Podcasts about xrm

Send me a Text Message hereFULL SHOW NOTES https://www.microsoftinnovationpodcast.com/647 Prepare to be inspired by Magnus Gether Sørensen, the Managing Specialist from Denmark hailed as the "XRM Tooling Wizard." Hear his fascinating transition from finance to tech, sparked by an influential high school teacher who opened his eyes to the world of web development. Magnus shares personal tales from Denmark, his love for tailored suits, and a pivotal experience in Copenhagen that forever altered his life's course. You'll discover how his passion for model-driven apps and Dynamics has led to the creation of powerful developer tools that continue to make waves within the tech community.  • Magnus's background and journey into the tech industry  • Significance of merging academic knowledge with real-world applications  • Innovations in XRM tooling and the importance of testing environments  • Challenges presented by asynchronous systems in Power Automate  • Future of development with AI and low-code platforms  • Addressing collaboration challenges among multiple developers  • Enhancing community tooling and best practices • Magnus believes that AI will change the way we interact with systems. • Tools Magnus created to help developers test business logic on their machines. • Community contributions and sharing knowledge. • He believes environments should be treated as cattle, not pets, for better development. • Magnus is excited about upcoming changes in Microsoft's development tools. •The importance of version control in collaborative development.This year we're adding a new show to our line up - The AI Advantage. We'll discuss the skills you need to thrive in an AI-enabled world. DynamicsMinds is a world-class event in Slovenia that brings together Microsoft product managers, industry leaders, and dedicated users to explore the latest in Microsoft Dynamics 365, the Power Platform, and Copilot.Early bird tickets are on sale now and listeners of the Microsoft Innovation Podcast get 10% off with the code MIPVIP144bff https://www.dynamicsminds.com/register/?voucher=MIPVIP144bff Accelerate your Microsoft career with the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge We've helped 1,300+ people across 70+ countries establish successful careers in the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 ecosystem.Benefit from expert guidance, a supportive community, and a clear career roadmap. A lot can change in 90 days, get started today!Support the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

PACX resourcesHow to (quickly) set Dataverse table icons - DEV Community by Riccardo GregoriPACX ⁓ an open source, extendable, add-on for Power Platform CLIHome · neronotte/Greg.Xrm.Command Wiki · GitHub Other NewsMeeting cost calculator

In this episode, Daryl and Scott talk to Andrew Vogel about his Microsoft Xrm Devops Data Tool  Some of the highlights: A fully caffeinated Scott Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data Configuration Data Migration Tool Package Deployer Extreme Programming Test Driven Development 100% code coverage Playwright RegX101 Andrew's Info and other links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewvogel7 GitHub: https://github.com/abvogel  Microsoft.Xrm.Devops.Data repo: https://github.com/abvogel/Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data  Got questions? Have your own tool you'd like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Scott at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Follow us on LinkedIn and @XrmToolCast for updates on future episodes. Do you want to see us too? Subscribe to our YouTube channel to view the last episodes. Don't forget to rate and leave a review for this show at Podchaser. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar | @ddlabar Scott Durow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdurow | @ScottDurow Editor: Linn Zaw Win: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linnzawwin  | @LinnZawWin Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/519 Ever wondered how spicy curry ties into the low-code revolution? Jason Earnshaw from Huddersfield, our Low Code Practice General Manager with a penchant for Dynamics 365, spices up our show with his rich stories from the IT landscape. His journey from the days of Lotus Notes to the cutting-edge Power Platform offers a delectable mix of personal anecdotes and professional insights, proving that technology and curries do get better with time.This episode is a time capsule, where we journey through the evolving world of IT, from the nostalgia of Microsoft CRM's transformation into Dynamics 365 to the emergence of solutions like Mendix. It's a narrative woven with reflections on the past and excitement for the future, as Jason walks us down memory lane, sharing how XRM's potential was overshadowed by internal politics and how customer needs drive the ever-changing tech ecosystem.Finally, the conversation shifts gears to the culture and aspirations driving A&S Group, where community involvement and diverse perspectives aren't just buzzwords—they're the very fabric of their success. We untangle the complex tube map of project management, stopping at critical stations like ALM and security, and discuss how these elements contribute to delivering tailored pathways to triumph for their clients. Join us for a session that marries the technical with the personal, the past with the present, and success with the community.AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power Platform 90 Day Mentoring Challenge 2024 https://ako.nz365guy.comSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

In this episode, Daryl and Scott talk to Riccardo Gregori about PACX command line utility belt for Dataverse and his other XrmToolBox tools. Some of the highlights: Scott Partying at Disney/Universal Studios PACX Lazy Italian Developers Automatically generate documentation at compile time Daryl and Scott give Ricardo homework Polymorphic lookup creation command XrmToolBox Tools _n.ConstantsExtractor _n.EnvironmentComparer _n.EnvironmentSolutionsComparer _n.ModernThemeBuilder _n.SolutionManager Generate Wiki Style Documentation for Dataverse Tables Please submit PRs for the PACX Riccardo's Info and other links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riccardogregori GitHub: https://github.com/neronotte PACX repo: https://github.com/neronotte/Greg.Xrm.Command XrmToolBox Tools repo: https://github.com/neronotte/Greg.Xrm Tool Reviews https://linnzawwin.blogspot.com/p/nenvironmentcomparer.html https://linnzawwin.blogspot.com/p/nenvironmentssolutioncomparer.html https://linnzawwin.blogspot.com/p/nsolutionmanager.html Got questions? Have your own tool you'd like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Scott at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Follow us on LinkedIn and @XrmToolCast for updates on future episodes. Do you want to see us too? Subscribe to our YouTube channel to view the last episodes. Don't forget to rate and leave a review for this show at Podchaser. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar | @ddlabar Scott Durow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdurow | @ScottDurow Editor: Linn Zaw Win: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linnzawwin  | @LinnZawWin Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

XRM is a well travelled athlete! He speaks about playing basketball all over the world and now he wants to call Australia home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/424 Discussions about Matt's background – what he enjoys spending his free time, the benefits of working from home and closeness to family A conversation about Dataverse Connector: an essential tool that allows businesses to integrate data from various sources and use it to make informed decisions and improve processes. The versatility of the Dataverse connector The importance of data connectors in the world of business and organizations. Matt shared his expertise and experience with the Dataverse connector and discussed the latest updates and developments in the field. What is Microsoft Dataverse connector and what is it commonly used for? Matt shares his views about the usage of legacy connectors today. What does Matt think about moving Dataverse from Pro code to low code? Matt shares his thoughts about optimizing Microsoft Dataverse usage.Questions Matt sees the most from the community around Data Connector.  OTHER RESOURCES  XrmToolBox - https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/Cinteros.Xrm.FetchXmlBuilder/ Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/level-up-for-dynamics-365/bjnkkhimoaclnddigpphpgkfgeggokam?hl=en Power Automate – Dataverse Cheatsheet - https://danikahil.com/2022/04/power-automate-dataverse-cheatsheet.html Create and use Custom APIs - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/developer/data-platform/custom-api Microsoft Dataverse business events - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/developer/data-platform/business-events Matt's GitHub - https://github.com/radioblazer AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

131. Today's guest is Magnus Gether Sørensen, a Dynamics 365 Field Service expert at Delegate in Denmark.  Magnus shares with us some of the Field Service projects he has worked on, as well as the interesting challenges that his customers have encountered using the application.Plus, Magnus talks about what's new and next for Field Service and gives a few tips for teams implementing the application. Episode Highlights[0:30] Magnus' background and his career in business applications[03:29] Magnus' experience using Dynamics 365 Field Service[06:27] The challenges of using Field Service in Denmark[10:03] On whether Field Service is often integrated with back-office systems[10:58] Demand for resource scheduling optimization[13:45] Comparing Field Service and Resco[17:08] What's new and next for Dynamics 365 Field Service[22:06] Features and changes that Magnus would like to see Field Service implement[24:07] Top three lessons Magnus has for teams building or deploying Field Service[27:44] Magnus' experience co-organizing Nordic Summit 2022[30:10] On why the Nordic Summit is a free event ResourcesDelegate.dkDelegate on LinkedInConnect with Magnus on Twitter or LinkedInFollow the Power Platform Weekly newsletter on TwitterRead Magnus' blog at XRM.DEVSupport the show

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/363A conversation about Guro Faller's life – country of origin, family, favourite food and hobbies! Talks about Guro's involvement with other communities around the world. Guro's story about how did she get into IT? A discussion about the career journey and educational background of Guro. A story about Guro's passion for designing - clothes and IT Guro's transition from being an IT to Microsoft Business Applications ecosystem Learn more about Guro's day to day tasks and her focus What does Guro see when it comes to the use of Dynamics 365 marketing? Guro's views about the XRM platform.  AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nz365guy)

In der Nachmittagsfolge begrüßen wir heute David Hahn, Co-Founder und CEO von Remberg. Wir sprechen über die Series-A-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 11 Millionen Euro in das Münchner Startup, das den Mittelstand in das Zeitalter von IoT bringen will. Das Unternehmen hat eine cloud-basierte Software entwickelt, um Mittelstandsunternehmen bei der Digitalisierung zu helfen. Dafür hat Remberg eine neue Art von CRM-Software für den immer wichtiger werdenden After-Sales-Service entwickelt, die den Bestand an Maschinen, Ausstattungen und Fahrzeugen erfasst sowie Servicetermine und Ersatzteilbestellungen. Mit der neuen Software sollen so die Weichen für das Zeitalter des “Internet of Things” (IoT) gestellt werden. Earlybird führt die Serie A an, zusammen mit Business Angels wie den Gründern von Celonis, Personio, UiPath, Konux uvm. Bereits in der letzten Seed-Finanzierungsrunde über 2 Millionen Euro hatten neben Speedinvest und Fly Ventures auch u.a. die Gründer von Personio und Forto investiert. Neu kommen nun die Celonis-Gründer Bastian Nominacher, Gründer und Executives von UiPath, Aiven, Instana und Konux mit dazu. Mit dem frischen Kapital wird das Gründerteam aus David Hahn, Julian Madrzak, Hagen Schmidtchen und Cecil Wöbker nun die Technologie weiterentwickeln und den Ausbau des Vertriebs vorantreiben. One more thing wird präsentiert von Sastrify – Die smarte Lösung für das Management eurer Software-Verträge. Erhaltet jetzt eine kostenlose Analyse eurer SaaS Tools und alle weiteren Informationen unter https://www.sastrify.com/insider

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/355 An introduction about Joel Lindstrom and his passion Joel shares his story on his career journey  Joel talks about his thoughts on the idea that Power Platform is just like xRM with a new look and feel A discussion about how the consulting landscape is currently changing  His thoughts about people becoming app makers from Dynamics 365 background The top 3 qualities that he is looking for when hiring for Power Apps makers Joel shares his thoughts on the roles of UX and UI specialists as part of the Power App teamAgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nz365guy)

Daryl and Scott interview Bram Colpaert, a good lazy developer based in Belgium, and chat about one of his tools, the Data Transporter.  Other topics: Queen's English and George Doubinski's accent Fellow listeners from The UP Podcast Star Trek, Lieutenant Commander Data and transporter beam Better Connection Management in XrmToolBox over Microsoft Tools Scott spends his free time diving into Dataverse GUID generation Daryl's magic trick to entertain aliens in Toy Story Editor of XrmToolCast, Linn Zaw Win The Simpsons episode about Homer repeatedly travels back in time with a toaster Made-up words Bram only works in the summer Dad Jokes Bram's Info and other links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bcolpaert https://github.com/bcolpaert https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/Colso.Xrm.DataTransporter https://linnzawwin.blogspot.com/p/data-transporter.html Got questions? Have your own tool you'd like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Scott at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ | @ddlabar Scott Durow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdurow/ | @ScottDurow Editor: Linn Zaw Win: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linnzawwin/  | @LinnZawWin Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Daryl and Scott interview Danish Naglekar, fellow MVP and a previous guest, and chat about his newest tool, the Dataverse DevTools for VsCode.   Other topics: Building VsCode Extensions The PCF Builder Bearer Tokens Danish's Info and other links: https://twitter.com/@DanzMaverick https://www.linkedin.com/in/danishnaglekar https://github.com/Danz-maveRICK/PCF-CustomControlBuilder https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=danish-naglekar.dataverse-devtools Got questions? Have your own tool you'd like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Scott at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ | @ddlabar Scott Durow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdurow// | @ScottDurow Editor: Linn Zaw Win: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linnzawwin/  | @LinnZawWin Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

So I noticed Ryan Cunningham, Product Lead for the Power Apps side of the Power Platform for Microsoft, suddenly come available in Teams. So of course, I ambushed him, and we had a great conversation about Power Apps and the whole Microsoft Business Applications group. Enjoy! Transcript below: Ryan Cunningham: Hello. This is Ryan. Steve Mordue: Hey, Ryan. Steve Mordue. How's it going? Ryan Cunningham: Oh, Steve Mordue. How you doing? Does this mean I'm in trouble? Steve Mordue: No, you are not in trouble, but you are about to be a guest on my Steve has a Chat podcast if you have time and are up for it. Ryan Cunningham: You mean like right now? Steve Mordue: Like right now. Already recording. Ryan Cunningham: Hey, okay. Let me check my calendar. There's nothing I'd rather do right now than being an impromptu guest on a Steve show. Steve Mordue: Well, we'll try and make sure you don't regret that decision. Ryan Cunningham: I regret a lot of decisions, Steve. But it wouldn't be the first. Steve Mordue: So let me ask you first, how long have you been with Microsoft? Ryan Cunningham: I just crossed five years. Steve Mordue: Five years. Ryan Cunningham: Just this past fall. Steve Mordue: I used to be a Salesforce consultant. We were Salesforce consultants for about 10 years and we moved over to Microsoft when they first moved CRM online back in 2011. So about 10 years ago. Ryan Cunningham: Sure, yeah. Steve Mordue: And I remember there being a few bumps making that transition going from on-premise to online, but then it kind of leveled out into what I kind of called the lazy river ride. It was predictable, it didn't move very quickly. There was no urgency and then James took over and he brought in all you young guys. It's been like a rocket roller coaster ride ever since. You ever got one of those really big roller coaster rides where you start praying for it to end, but you know it's not going to. It's just going to keep looping around and you can't get off. I almost feel like for a lot of us partners that have been around at least since it was lazy river, man, my head is rocking from all of the stuff you guys are doing. Ryan Cunningham: We don't do lazy rivers very well, Steve. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: Not anymore. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: At least class three rapids around here. Steve Mordue: How is it like on the inside for that kind of pace and ideation and everything that's going on internally? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question. It certainly has not been constant here either. And again my experience in this community is not as long as yours. I joined at about five years ago and specifically joined the Power Apps team long before Power Apps was really a thing. I joined the team when Project Siena was for those that are familiar with that term, the sort of precursor to Power Apps was kind of in an early beta phase and there were grand ambitions of expanding out who could build software, but not a lot of... How do we say it coming out? Not a ton of product truth yet behind that. Steve Mordue: So I was in the audience, I think for one of your very first presentations before a big group of this product. You looked a little deer in the headlights at the time. Ryan Cunningham: I still feel that way sometimes. But if you take that over the course of the last five years where that idea has solidified, that product has gotten more mature. Certainly there's still more work to do, but we've gone from literally zero humans using at least standalone Power Apps to millions around the world and really also in the same breath gone from very long tail, very simple use cases to this grand merger with the Dynamics platform and customers building and trusting frankly much more sophisticated workloads to the platform. Ryan Cunningham: The world has changed a lot for us internally in how we approach this problem as you go through that product maturity life cycle. In the early stage, it's really about can we make anyone successful here? Now, it is much more about how do we scale and how do we focus on enterprise trust and developer productivity and really turn millions into hundreds of millions and that's... Steve Mordue: Oh, we got a little stall there. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Did I lose you for a second? Steve Mordue: Just for a second. I kind of sometimes think of Microsoft kind of like the Japanese manufacturing economy where they saw ideas that we would come up with and then they would put all their resources to make it better, faster, cheaper whereas a lot of the things we're doing in the power platform are not things that weren't being done before by others, it's just that someone on the team somewhere recognize hey, there's this movement going on out here with some of these smaller players and I think it's got some legs, so let's let's drop all of the arsenal that we have available as Microsoft onto this idea because clearly, we weren't the first low code platform right, but suddenly we're bringing everything Microsoft has to bear on this idea and to see it blow up like that. Steve Mordue: You can say that for almost everything that we've got going on, the bots, the flow, all of these sorts of things. We weren't the first, but then we came in and just put all this horsepower into an idea. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. And it so much is about execution and executing at the right time and doing it for the right people. I think part of the reason why we internally work quickly and don't want to be on the lazy river is also because I think we tried to approach it with this fundamental... This is going to sound weird, but distrust of our own instincts to say, "Look, we have a thesis that people are going to want to build software faster. We have a thesis that they're going to want to do that beyond just forms over data." That's going to take many different forms, but in the nitty-gritty details of who's actually going to find the most value in individual features and individual assembly of those features, there's a lot of margin for error. Ryan Cunningham: And the sooner you get real software into the hands of real humans and they can use it and react to it and give you feedback actively about it, but also just give you feedback through their usage or non-usage of it, then the sooner you have real data to adjust and change and do the next thing. Steve Mordue: So it's not really like build it and they will come, it's more like build something and let's see who comes. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Steve Mordue: And then build some more. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Develop a relationship with those people who have come and then make sure that you're building it in a way that they're going to get really excited about it and then extend to others. So we really prioritize when we have enough of a hypothesis to head in a direction get there as soon as possible in the world and then work really closely and quickly once you've landed there to make it great and learn, and be willing to be wrong and be willing to change. Steve Mordue: Don't worry. I pointed out when you [crosstalk 00:07:43]. It's a lot of moving parts. I know you came in through the Power Apps door but have since kind of got your fingers into the whole pieces of platform it feels like. There's a lot of moving parts going on. Whenever you have that many moving parts, there's going to be bumps and issues along the way. So I can imagine that's just a continuous thing that somebody's building something over here. Somebody over here. Maybe they didn't coordinate as well as they should have and it gets discovered later and then I imagine these little fire drills going on internally [inaudible 00:08:20]. Steve Mordue: Left hand wasn't talking to the right hand enough. Let's get that stuff going on. Is that part of your role is to referee those sorts of things or identify them? Ryan Cunningham: I guess you could say that. And that's also part of growing a product and a team across a really wide surface area. How do we put in place the right listening mechanisms to customers, to data and reviews internally so that we can catch those things sooner and react to them more quickly. Because in many ways the ambition here is to span a really wide area of software and do it with a platform that has value and relevance to a number of different people in that spectrum, which is fundamentally really hard. Ryan Cunningham: It's one thing to build a focused experience for one very focused narrow niche of people, it's another... That alone is hard. It's another to build a set of tools that a lot of different people can use. But I think that was actually part of our... If you rewind several years ago and look at what we did between the Power Apps software project which started independently and the Dynamics platform and bringing them together, we really realized at the limit these things converge. At the limit, making it easier for non-traditional software people, citizen developers, amateurs, makers, whatever you want to call them and making it faster for professionals to build apps, those two ends have to meet each other at some point for this to really scale. So let's rip that band-aid off. Steve Mordue: How close do you think we are? How close do you think we are to getting to that ideal point? I mean, I think there's still... Even when I look at the citizen developer stories, a citizen can go so far and obviously we'd like them to go as far as they're able to go, to comfortably go and pro dev takes over. I have to assume there's a continuous motion inside to keep trying to move that line. Let's simplify some of these formulas that may be required that are just whatever those stopping blocks where you see a citizen is able to get this far, it hits a wall. Can we get them to the next wall? How much is going on in that process? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question and it is really one of the central things that keeps driving a lot of what we do. I mean, we also look at a professional's experience through that journey, right? You look at not enlightened professionals such as yourselves, but all of the other software people out in the world who are very skeptical of platforms and who have an instinct to start from scratch and write everything themselves and go through some- Steve Mordue: Some of that could be financially motivated also. Ryan Cunningham: Oh, sure. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Ryan Cunningham: Right? But I think realizing that two trends are really converging here. To your point earlier, low code is not new, but we've had low code in two very different camps. This is the company that shipped Excel 35 years ago, 36 years ago. We certainly know low code for true amateurs and there's always been this world of people without a software development background working around the boundaries of the software they're given with tools to solve problems and that goes straight to- Steve Mordue: To Access wizards. Ryan Cunningham: Absolutely. Excel macros, VBA, Access, InfoPath and a number of other products outside of Microsoft. That's an enduring tradition. Then on the other side, what we've been doing is professional software people for the last 40 years is just adding layers of abstraction and tooling and not repeating ourselves and borrowing from other people to more efficiently assemble solutions as well. You can look at a platform like what XRM was unofficially and Dataverse and Power Apps on top of it now is just a natural extension of making professionals more efficient by not doing everything from scratch. Ryan Cunningham: Now, that's where those two trends converge and you're absolutely right to answer your question. We focus on okay, we made a number of people successful at that. There's a plenty of existence proof in our community and in our growth numbers and in our customer stories of people coming at the product from both of those directions and getting really successful and having a lot to show for it. Now of course behind the scenes, we're still, I would say very hungry. We're still at a couple orders of magnitude less than the addressable market of software consuming humans of what we could be serving even for all the astronomical growth we've seen in the platform over the last couple years. Ryan Cunningham: I mean, so it is absolutely about how do we take people coming in the front door. I'm a Teams user. I have some Excel skills. I happen to stumble on this Power Apps thing. How far do I get on my first try? What brings me back? How do I go from a user who expresses intent to a user who has a moment of success, to a user who then has an app that's used in production. And even from that point to somebody who keeps coming back to keep putting apps in production. Ryan Cunningham: Then similarly as a professional, how do I expand my tool set from Azure and Visual Studio and how do I have good experiences in my first try with a platform. How do I get to a point where I put something out there that humans are using in the world and I feel good about it. We really closely look at retention. We look at funnels through those early experiences. We look at satisfaction. All those annoying prompts of how likely are you to recommend Power Apps to a friend or colleague. Those are really valuable data points for us in addition to just the general growth rates overall because of indicators of the likelihood to be successful and grow in the future. Steve Mordue: I know we definitely have had success with enterprise organizations in particular where IT has embraced this and shepherded the process and built in their own systems like at the whole chevron way that they go about making power apps developers out of their employees and they've got a very specific process. I guess the other side of the equation is a smaller company that doesn't have those kind of resources. It's just Bob who's always been handy with spreadsheets. Suddenly he's trying to figure his way around. It seems like that's the one where we can't give that guy too much help. Steve Mordue: In enterprise they're going to have their system. Maybe have classes internally. They send their people to and stuff like that. It's a smaller organizations where he's left to the documents he can find and what he can understand. I think one of the things that Microsoft has always been a little bit of a challenge with Microsoft and documentation in particular is that they assume a certain level of understanding, in particular Microsoft and there's lots of folks that are coming to the platform that have zero understanding of Microsoft or history or know anything. Even acronyms or none of it. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Steve Mordue: It's almost like you can't make the documentation too dumbed down to get to that success. Well, how big is the team up to? Now, the last number I heard, and this has been a while ago, it was like 7,000. It was a pretty, pretty good sized team for the bag. How big is it now? Ryan Cunningham: That's a good question. I'm not trying to dodge you. I suppose I could look it up. I don't know for sure what James is... That whole business applications group org size is, but that's actually probably a decent estimate now that's not too inaccurate. Now, that's spread across a really wide surface area. All of the first party Dynamics apps have dedicated teams working on them. There are a number of other orgs within that organization focused on things like advancing AI and whatnot and then there's the core platform team, the Charles Lamanna team which I'm a part of which we structure into a core team focused on the backend, on Dataverse. A core team focused on each of the front-end products, so Power Apps, that's my team, Power Automate, Power Virtual agents. Then we also have a dedicated group in the platform org around admin and pro developers, and those experiences. Steve Mordue: I think when he came in, there was closer to a thousand on the team. So I mean the team has exponentially grown because you can't keep a lazy river going. Ryan Cunningham: Nope. Steve Mordue: You got to have speed when you got that many people on the payroll all working on something. So I also recall a time and I know it's still there, where there was a maniacal focus by the business applications group on the competitors particularly Salesforce at the time. I know that Salesforce is still in the radar. It does feel like we've kind of moved from really being focused on one primary competitor as we've launched all of these different applications into other competitive spaces where now you guys have hundreds of competitors that are all out there. How much do you guys focus on what the competition is doing internally and how you guys gauge what directions to go? Ryan Cunningham: It's really important to be aware of what people are doing in the marketplace. And we do spend a lot of time making sure that we have an intimate and hands-on not just academic understanding of what a lot of different software companies are producing out there. Steve Mordue: So you guys have licenses for everything. Ryan Cunningham: Well, where we can and it gets complicated because Microsoft also partners with many companies. Some companies we have agreements with about who will or won't use what software and we've got a lot of great lawyers to help us navigate that whole [inaudible 00:18:23]. I think the point is look, we're adding software to a world that already has a lot of software in it. It's important to look left and right and be aware of what else is out there because none of this stuff gets consumed in a vacuum by customers. You go to any moderately large customer organization, there's already a CRM system or seven in place. There's already an ERP system or eight in place and there's already a bunch of individual systems around that for point things and that's just the world we live in. Steve Mordue: And if they're exploring something, they're seldom exploring one thing. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly, right? And often if they're exploring especially a platform. There's a lot of existing things and a lot of the conversations become about how does this work in an existing ecosystem and how does it work? How can it potentially consolidate some of those things? We had Ecolab at a recent digital event talking about some of their Power Apps and Dynamics implementations. The average field employee at Ecolab had something like 27 different individual tools that they had to use to get their job done and it was a mix of... I mean, they had dynamics and they had Salesforce, and they had an ERP system, and they had a whole bunch of individual custom homegrown things and this experience was just really terrible for somebody out there on a tablet or a phone trying to inspect your water filter at your company. Ryan Cunningham: Starting to bring in Power Apps as a front door to some of those other systems without replacing them and just even making the wayfinding better is key. So look, it's important for us to be aware of what the world is doing. I would say it's never as simple as pure competitor or not in that picture because look, if you're a company like Microsoft, a lot of the names you rattled off or alluded to are also Azure customers and they're partners with them in other places. We're fundamentally a platform company I think is what it comes down to. Ryan Cunningham: The world is better when people can choose what they want to choose and are able to interoperate with those things at scale. Now obviously, there's incentive for us to have them using our stuff in that mix which is why we care a lot about it, but there's really not... Especially if you look at the body of what we offer even just in the platform, there isn't a clean head-to-head competitor right now for all of it. There are certainly competitors for each piece and I think being aware that those customers have choices and that we want them to genuinely choose the best and we want to be the best, that means we have to be aware of what best is and what customers define as best is just as important as what the guy down the street is offering. I think that the business applications group has the advantage of the enormous coattails of Office 365, now Microsoft 365. Steve Mordue: Sure. I don't know how many calls I get from a brand new customer who the primary reason they're looking at this platform is because they're already using Microsoft 365. And this idea that we want everything to work together and talk together. I think those coattails are an example of coattails that some of the other companies just don't have. You look at Salesforce for example. They don't have this productivity suite with millions and millions of users. So their story is going to be... We can integrate story and I just see more and more... I think we have to give such a credit for this because for many years Microsoft had a mixed reputation with IT. Steve Mordue: There are lots of people that hated them and all sorts of different things and such. It kind of seemed to have changed the attitude of the company to where IT who used to be like we're using on-premise exchange that's the only Microsoft thing we're going to touch. Now, they've brought in Microsoft 365. Now from an IT standpoint, it's you know what, I don't want to make my life any more difficult than it needs to be. What's the most logical choice for business applications when we're already stood up on all of this stuff and it's an enormous advantage and a huge coattail for the whole business applications group to ride in on. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. I mean, this is why we focus so much on the platform working well in Teams for example. We've put a lot of effort into that this past year. I mean, part of that is the world turned upside down and changed and everybody started working in Teams. The other part of that is it's a huge advantage for a customer to be able to program and customize the collaboration environment whatever that is. Again, there's a long history of that within Office with SharePoint and InfoPath and stuff like that, but being able to look at that in a modern world and say, "I already have every employee working every day inside the team's environment. If I can start to put line of business applications in that environment, it's much easier for those employees to discover and it's much easier for them to then work around and collaborate around when those experiences require some form of collaboration." Ryan Cunningham: There are major Microsoft customers, Fortune 500 customers with tens and hundreds of thousands of users in their tenant that have more than half of those users using a Power App and Teams every month. You see IT departments using it. Those are not necessarily bottom-up Citizen Developer apps. You see IT departments really seeing that as a way to sort of re-imagine maybe what we might have called an intranet site 10 years ago sort of imagine an employee-facing app in the place where employees are already working. Steve Mordue: Sometimes, I actually feel a little guilty that one of our biggest growth years was a result of a virus and certainly the same could be said of Teams. I mean Teams was doing fine, but a virus really catapulted Teams to the position that it is. You feel a little guilty, but then again it is what it is and somebody has to feel that that need and it does create some massive opportunity. Ryan Cunningham: For me, especially rewinding to March and April, and May, I mean this was really a pressure test of our whole promise. The whole shtick and spiel of saying you can develop apps faster, you can do it quickly, you don't have to go through all the time and expense of software development, you can put it where people want to use it. Got a lot less nice to have in March of 2020 went from a lot of people from, "Oh, that sounds cool. I'll check that out someday." Steve Mordue: Someday. Ryan Cunningham: This is interesting to this is the only game in town. There were moments where I don't... I hear what you're saying. It is difficult to go feel like you're thumping your chest about business success in a year where a lot of people have had a really hard time and I really want to be sensitive to that. At the same time, the platform has really directly and indirectly helped a lot of people with those struggles. A whole number of both through the healthcare response to COVID, solutions that were implemented almost literally overnight in some cases for major state governments around the US and national governments abroad to first roll out large-scale testing programs on portals with CDS or Dataverse behind it and then roll out economic assistance programs on the same platform. Ryan Cunningham: Now rolling out return to work solutions on the same platform. Those are things where the traditional model of start up a waterfall development process, go write a giant requirements document, triple bit it, go through... You don't have the luxury of the Gantt chart in this world and you have to be able to move fast. And those are places where that is the platform we've been building for is that environment where we got to move fast. We have to do it non-traditionally and we have to do it with a lot less effort. Ryan Cunningham: This last year has really forced us to hone in on that value prop and prove that it's real, and frankly adjust a lot to make it more real for people who are trying to get that value. So I would say we have learned a lot in the course of this pandemic. A lot of people have. But we've also been able to do some good for the world in the same breath. Steve Mordue: It definitely was interesting timing because if you guys probably had to pick a time for a super crunch test of our platform maybe you don't like to see it in another year out or something. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, sure. Steve Mordue: You can't cage these things, but it kind of hit when you guys still had some wiring to finish and I would imagine that the pressure on the team... It's one thing to we got to be out to market quickly because of competition. It's another thing because something like this has come. It has to bring a huge amount of pressure the team. We need to take Teams to the next level. We need to take build your own apps the next level and suddenly we've got an entire workforce that is now working from home that never planned to be working from home that is completely ill-equipped for that entire motion and these people need this stuff fast. Ryan Cunningham: Not to mention an entire generation of students who are now learning remotely, many of them in every age group from my first grader up to colleges and in universities. It's affected everybody. But you're right. I mean, the platform has been stretched at every level and it's not just the power platform. You're right. It's also very much Teams. I saw a really interesting internal presentation from an engineering leader in the Teams org comparing, "Look, here's what our load and traffic pattern looked like in January of 2021 and then to scale superimposing that on what it looked like in March." Not to say that, "Hey, look at all this great growth," it was really to say, "Look at what it took to go scale a planet scale service that dramatically that quickly." That was not a pleasant experience for the engineers having to work on that. That was [crosstalk 00:28:54]- Steve Mordue: A lot of late nights. Ryan Cunningham: ... 24/7 as any other response. No software is perfect. We like to gripe about everything and I share my set of barbs with stuff, but man, I have a ton of respect for the Teams engineering group and how well they have handled that just massive overnight change. Steve Mordue: So as we're recording this, vaccines for the virus are rolling out and I assume at some point in the coming months, it'll be behind us. In the meantime, it was around long enough to push lots of people to work from home longer than maybe their company owners thought would have to happen, but now they've gotten used to that. They've made accommodation. They've made it work. What do you think is going to happen when this particular crisis has passed and there's the ability to go back to normal? What do you think is going to happen with all these folks? Are we going to see a mass return to offices? Are we going to see people say, "This is working"? What are you guys thinking? Ryan Cunningham: I mean, it's a good question. I don't know that I can speak for all of Microsoft on this one, but I think at least in our own team- Steve Mordue: What do you think? Ryan Cunningham: I mean look, our team is already very globally distributed. We have the majority of our engineers and core products, PMs working in the Pacific time zone, but we have a significant group in Paris. We have a significant group in Bangalore. We have individual pockets. We have people in Fargo, North Dakota. We have a team in- Steve Mordue: Israel? Ryan Cunningham: We certainly have team in Israel. We have teams in parts of Europe. We have a team in Toronto. If nothing else, I think the core of [inaudible 00:30:49] sound based team has developed a lot more empathy for the experience of the very significant portion of our group that works around the world. I'm very experienced joining Teams. And I really hope that that continues if nothing else even if we all end up back in offices at a more regular level. Ryan Cunningham: We've learned at digital events and conferences and stuff. Certainly, it is not the same as being in the room with people catching up and networking, finding those discovery and unplanned moments with humans. And I do believe that we will go back to getting in rooms together both as employees, but also as colleagues. I really hope that we get to do that again soon. However, some of the digital events that we've pulled off as unelegant as some of them have come together also very rapidly having to figure out how to completely reimagine conferences like Ignite virtually in just a few months, those themselves were gargantuan tactics. In some cases there were orders of magnitude more participation in those events than when you had to get on a plane and fly to Orlando to get the benefit really. So there's- Steve Mordue: If I'm Microsoft, I don't know how eager I am to go back to in-person events given the success of like you say, I mean, so many more people able to attend. Microsoft's goal in having an event isn't for us all to hang out and have beers, it's to disseminate product information to his broader audience as possible and as deep a format as possible. Sitting in a session room, watching some guy present a slide deck, maybe it's a little more interactive, but not enough more interactive to justify the 30 people behind me versus 3,000 people that could be behind me in a video meeting. Steve Mordue: So from Microsoft's standpoint, you would think that, "Hey, great news. We don't have to go back to doing live events," which are, I think, they got to be a huge expense, a huge logistical challenge, all that sort of stuff. So the only reason to go back- Ryan Cunningham: I mean, I imagine- Steve Mordue: ... would be camaraderie or something. Ryan Cunningham: Like all things moderation. I'm sure we will... I hope we will reconvene at least some live events and I'm sure we will. I think we've learned that there's probably a bias before this year, this past year that the digital portion of a live event would be much less valuable. I mean, even already, I don't want to overplay that hand. Even already, we would frequently get more total usage over a lifespan of content consumed digitally when it was produced at the live event than at the live event itself. Ryan Cunningham: You could take a keynote at Ignite. There's 3,000, 10,000 people in the room, whatever, but then you go take the three months following the streaming of that online would accumulate far more visitors and end users than originally. That was already known. But being able to extend that from the keynote stage out to every session and being able to figure out how to produce that type of an event in a very decentralized way is, I think we've learned a lot through that process. Ryan Cunningham: Back to your question about people going to offices and the team working in places, I think there's a lot of reasons why a lot of people really value that type of working whether... There's people on my team who live alone and are really, really craving social interaction with other humans that are ready to come back. But there's also people on my team and self included with young kids in the house and a lot to manage and really craving return to normalcy and in that type of life environment. Ryan Cunningham: So I think work from home, I think we've all learned that we can do it and some people have learned that it's even better for them, but I think there's a lot of people who will still value working in a physical location and I hope we'll return to a good chunk of that as well. Steve Mordue: Yeah. It does get kind of lonely for a lot of folks especially those social people that need to be around people, need the water cooler or need to go to lunch. Ryan Cunningham: Yep. Steve Mordue: That's the best part of what they're doing. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Let me ask you about... Maybe I'll get a little self-serving here now. Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Steve Mordue: You're familiar with our RapidStart CRM? Ryan Cunningham: Yep. Steve Mordue: And I'm just curious about what the team internally thinks about motions like the one we're doing and others are looking at where we've... And I know you'll be a little biased because you're more on the platform side as is Charles. Charles is less concerned about the first party group. They got their own problems to deal with, but we're basically making a business out of building simpler versions of what the first party Teams have built for an audience that isn't prepared for that level of complexity. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: And we've built it to run on the $10 pass, and we recently made it free. I'm just curious what the talk in the halls is about ISVs like us that are basically building products that are attacking directly. I mean, I'm attacking directly the sales professional for sure and even enterprise for a lot of customers because you've given us enough in the platform that I can build quite a bit for a lot of customers before I'd have to really go to those first party. What's the talk in the halls about that kind of motions? Ryan Cunningham: Well, luckily we don't have any halls anymore, Steve. We're all working from home. Steve Mordue: That's true. Ryan Cunningham: Otherwise we're- Steve Mordue: In the video halls. Ryan Cunningham: [crosstalk 00:36:36] Steve Mordue in every elevator lobby. Look, I will say a couple things on that. I don't want to speak for Charles, but from a platform perspective and certainly from my perspective too. Yes, our day job is focused on building a platform. Our biggest customer of the first party apps running on that platform still by revenue at least. We have a lot of incentive as a Microsoft shareholder and as a member of the business applications group and seeing the first party apps be successful. In fact, a lot of our effort and our engineering effort goes into helping those first-party apps be successful and stay successful and get modern and get fast and get mobile in addition to or in some cases around building the core platform itself. Steve Mordue: James has said not that long ago that make no mistake, those are what pay the rent. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, absolutely. Look, Power Apps is driving an incredible amount of growth from a both a usage and a revenue perspective. But yeah, I mean there's an established greater than a decade business in CRM at scale that customers are driving themselves trusting billions of dollars of business too and paying Microsoft a lot of money for that privilege, right? So we take that very seriously and we are directly incented to protect that business whatever that means. Ryan Cunningham: Now, that said to rewind earlier in the conversation, we're a platform company at heart right and it's not just that Steve Mordue can go out there and build a CRM system on the Dataverse and Power Apps platform. I mean, we have multiple Power Apps competitors building on the Azure platform. They're Azure, and that's great as a shareholder and as a software person. The best solution should win and that's never going to be a one-size-fits-all answer for every customer. To your point, there are some customers that are going to be best served by a certain piece of software and Microsoft as a builder of generic things is not going to get into every niche, it's not going to get into every vertical. Ryan Cunningham: We want an ecosystem of people to build on the platform and extend things and even build fully standalone things for those niches, because we won't get there ourselves and we know that there are more of them out there where expertise needs to go. For Microsoft to really have a Microsoft product offering at scale, it needs to have a really big business behind. It's a really big business behind it. There's plenty of opportunity in the market at other multiples that is very profitable for software vendors and very advantageous for customers that are businesses that Microsoft will not directly enter. Ryan Cunningham: So I think in those worlds if the platform doesn't work for that, then what's the point of having a platform. It needs to work for that and we need to make RapidStart successful just like we need to make the first party Dynamics app successful. I believe those two things are not at odds with each other and they should live in a co-existing world. Ryan Cunningham: From a customer perspective even as a platform person, a lot of people will come in and say, "Should I use this off-the-shelf piece of software or should I build it myself in Power Apps?" My first answer to them is always if the off-the-shelf thing does what you needed to do or even does 80% of what you needed to do, it's usually worth buying. And even if the price tag feels more expensive, because what you're buying there is a team of people behind that app who not only put all the effort into making it, but are going to keep putting effort into making it better. Ryan Cunningham: And whether that's Steve's team or whether that's Muhammad Alam's team that is almost less relevant. The concept is I'm going to buy a piece of software that people have already figured out a lot of the hard parts for this use case and they're going to keep making it better. Now the ability to extend it is really important in business applications because selling shoes is very different than selling wind turbines even if it all involves selling stuff. [crosstalk 00:40:55] Steve Mordue: It's one of the reasons we ended up going free. When I first came up with that idea for RapidStart, we launched it in 2015 and it sat on top of CRM online the single SKU at the time to just really make the whole thing simpler because there was that need for something to be simpler. I had this dream that I was just going to sell that. People would buy it, pay me every month and leave me the hell alone. That was what I had imagined. But everybody, everybody wants to tweak and fiddle and make it unique. We actually look back last year at our revenue with 10 times more revenue on the services of helping customers customize our app that we did on the recurring revenue. Steve Mordue: That's the reason we decided, "Well, let's just make the app free and lean into the services as much," because I really didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that business at all. Now, I'm being you know pulled in or the godfather won't let me out of the services business. But you're right, everybody needs something unique. So we really recast them as accelerators as opposed to here's something you just buy and use. But it's the same even with the first party apps. Nobody installs a first party app and just uses it. Steve Mordue: They've all got to be molded to fit the business, and I think that that's the nice thing about the platform whether it's on first party or just on Power Apps is you've got all the tools to... And that's actually one of the challenges we run into, I'm sure you guys do too where they look at some app and they say, "Oh, that's not exactly what I need," and then they move on, without realizing that, you know what, that can be exactly what you need and frankly, with the tools available that we have today, not that expensive, not anything like it used to be. Ryan Cunningham: Supposed than what I need and I can make it to work. Steve Mordue: Yeah, and a fraction of what it used to cost to do those kind of services. Ryan Cunningham: Part of making this stuff easier to adopt is about having apps that are much... At least much closer to what a customer needs out of the box. They don't have to do a bunch of customization upfront. I think something that we have been on the journey from, if you go rewind 10 years in CRM to now is make it less of a giant monolith make individual modules much more ready to consume. We've done a lot of work around that. But even within Power Apps, a lot of people get started by grabbing a template and implementing it and starting to use it fairly stock and then realizing, "Hey, I want to put my logo on it and then I want to change this form and then I want to change the field. And then I want a thing to kick off." Ryan Cunningham: Making the customization incremental as opposed to putting a really large tax and price tag before it's useful is one of the tactics we pursue to make it easier to get more people started. But that said, there will always be the need to tailor and customize software in a business application space. I think one of the trends we are seeing is this blurring of lines between... We like to pretend classically that there are ISVs who produce software and put it in the world and then never touch it. Ryan Cunningham: Then there are system integrators who do the dirty work of services to make it work. Those lines get really blurry in the modern world where from a classic services provider standpoint when I'm building and customizing on a platform, it's actually much easier to then start to templatize and repeat my solutions so I'm not just doing labor every single time. Ryan Cunningham: And to your point from a software maker perspective for customers who want to constantly customize it, it gets more viable to go the other direction depending on what your business model is. We see a lot of people living in that world. We even see customers themselves, energy companies, healthcare companies building stuff, financial services companies building stuff for themselves on the platform and starting to commercialize it to other people in their industry because it's on a platform that's transferable and that's something that classically you didn't see with line of business software. Ryan Cunningham: It was built in a vacuum custom and very tailored for one customer and then it sort of lived in that silo for a long time. But the ability to make those assets transferable is a huge advantage in this world. Steve Mordue: Back when they really first started pushing the Citizen Developer motion, I think I wrote a post about the end of SI business. This is it. We're all dead now. They won't need us anymore. The sky is falling, Chicken Little. But now as we've seen this thing roll out, because it is less expensive to get deployed, there are people building apps and using apps that would never have considered it before. Steve Mordue: So while I would say it's probably true that our average customer SI project has lost a zero in value, there's 10 times as many of them. So it's evened itself out. We've got many more customers available now than when the only way you could become a customer was if you had really deep pockets and a lot of patience. So we just opened up the number of potential customers by 10 times even though the deployment of each has gone down some. I'm not disappointed. Ryan Cunningham: And I think that trend is holding. I mean, I think you see even some of the big services companies like the big four and stuff like that actually seeing some very similar trends where they're building real practices on power platform whereas a couple years ago, they didn't see it as something for their business model, maybe even a threat to their business model. Now, they're realizing, "Look, I can drive real revenue out of this just the size and dollar amount and number of projects is a different mix that it was before." Ryan Cunningham: In some cases, those tend towards strategic consulting engagements. It becomes, let me think about helping a... For a large global organization to wrap their head around how do I use Citizen Development in my company? How do I keep it secure? How do I monitor it? Where do I let a business unit roll their own thing versus where do I bring in a team of professionals to build and maintain a solution? Ryan Cunningham: Even just that decision-making process and the center of excellence and governance practices that go around it, that's a major engagement that a lot of customers need help with right now because they're not organized for that today or resourced for it today. And then you look at getting into each of those individual projects. Certainly today, even in a future where apps are 10 times as easy to build as they are today, if I'm going to go roll out a mission mission-critical solution for managing customer data and critical decisions, I need software-minded people to help me think about how to keep that compliant, about how to build it in a way that humans are going to want to use it. Ryan Cunningham: Just because we put a tool like Photoshop out there in the world, does not instantly make everybody a photographer and a digital artist. There's still that mindset and expertise that's going to be really necessary. So for a lot of a lot of services organizations right now, I think they're realizing that there is a lot of value both in the execution of individual apps and projects, but then also in helping customers adapt to this new world where a lot of people can build software and you have to make decisions about who builds what and how you maintain it. [crosstalk 00:48:15] Steve Mordue: I think definitely one of the areas that's been blown up completely is the old ROI story because you used to be looking at a significant investment to deploy something of time and money, and the return on that investment was quite some time. That was what was going to limit the growth of any business application platform out there was... And now, that's produced almost nothing. Steve Mordue: So literally, Bob can go build something that starts generating revenue or saving money in an afternoon. The ROI, it's not even a question anymore about a half a day of Bob's time to go and streamline this process and save us five hours a day with his four-hour effort. Ryan Cunningham: True. Steve Mordue: And that didn't exist before. That just did not exist within the dynamics application before platform, before Power Apps, before Canvas apps. It's completely changed the entire game. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Before I let you go, what of the things as you look across the landscape right now and maybe the things that are coming up that have been discussed that people are aware of, what excites you the most? What do you think is... Two things. What are you the most excited about? And the other one is what do you think more customers would be excited about if they understood it better or realized that that's the most underutilized high value thing that people are just missing? Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Those are big questions. I think there's a lot that I get excited about. For people that know me, it's not hard to get excited. Steve Mordue: Yeah. You're excited about that lamp in the background, I know. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. It's a great lamp. It's not. It's a crappy lamp from Ikea. Look, I think for me certainly there's a ton of work in our feature backlog that's really cool and really exciting and there's a lot of work particularly around bringing intelligence to the authoring experience that I'm pretty excited about. To the earlier conversation we're having about make it easier for people to be successful and maybe not have to deal with that formula bar, there's a lot of cool stuff that we're starting to apply. Ryan Cunningham: We've brought AI builder to end user apps, but actually bringing that to the maker experience of being just... And not in magical unicorn pixie dust ways, but just in really practical ways suggesting ways for people to do things, suggesting things to do next, making it possible to write logic in natural language as opposed to having to know all the ins and outs of the formula for example. There's some really cool stuff cooking there that I think will start to continue to open up orders of magnitude of humans who can be successful. Steve Mordue: Move that bar farther down the path. Ryan Cunningham: Absolutely, right? Classically, sometimes we think about those as tools just for true amateurs. But if you go look at even all the productivity that a product like visual studio has brought to professional developers, it's in stuff like Typeahead and linting and all that. It's really about bringing micro intelligence to those micro interactions that a person who's living in this tool for eight hours a day, all day long is going to need to be really productive. Ryan Cunningham: So we're really thinking about that both ways. So those things are exciting. I think if you zoom out a little bit though beyond the individual level of feature work, I would say, what's most exciting to me and what I hope is getting more exciting to more customers is less about any one individual feature or product and more about what's possible when you start to combine them at scale. Ryan Cunningham: I think that's where, if you look at organizations that have really gone all in on Citizen Development and low code for professionals as well and start to work together, you see this new way of working where you have professionals and amateurs and IT people and business people knowing each other and working side by side in a place where they traditionally were opposed to each other. Or at least just not aware of each other. And that's where you get not just one cool app with one cool feature, but literally thousands of applications inside of organizations that are just creating a crazy amount of value and you start to change you start to change the lives of people in those organizations. Ryan Cunningham: Both the people that are able to implement that stuff, but also you just make the jobs better for the people who get to use stuff that was built by their company and was built much faster. That's ultimately super exciting to me is to start to see this making a real change in the way that humans are working and doing it through a mix of apps and bots and automations, and Teams experiences. Ryan Cunningham: It's when those things sort of work together in concert that I think they get most exciting. So I'm thrilled to see that happening. I'm really excited about this end-to-end stack of what customers have done with Azure resources through power platform, in Teams and how that has created a meaningful dent and how a company works. I'm super excited about all the work we're doing to make that smoother to actually implement and manage and deploy, but I really hope customers see beyond the one use case, see beyond the one app or see beyond the one product and see what's possible when I start to change the economics of how software is rolled out in my company. And by economics, I mean not just- Steve Mordue: It is a discovery process. Ryan Cunningham: ... who participates. Right, yeah. Steve Mordue: It is a discovery process. They stumble upon something. They start using something and if they're successful with it, then they start discovering these other pieces around it that are available around it to extend on it. I don't think the technology itself right now that we have is a blocker to growth. I think the biggest challenge with growth right now probably relies more on the complexity of the licensing side. I mean, there's a lot of customers- Ryan Cunningham: I mean, I think there's good parts of it. Steve Mordue: ... that can't even get started because they don't understand what they even need or how to buy especially in the Power Apps store where they've got some seated Power Apps capabilities, they don't know what word seated even means or that they have it, and then they're seeing all these cool Power Apps things and they can't figure out how do I get from here to there? Why can't I do this and that? I think that probably is a bigger blocker to potential growth than the technology itself. Ryan Cunningham: Maybe. I would say certainly- Steve Mordue: Have you read the licensing guide? Ryan Cunningham: It's my favorite James Joyce story. Steve Mordue: I'll bet. Well, most customers haven't and wouldn't. Ryan Cunningham: Well, I guess what I would maybe zoom out from that, I would say... You're right. The technology itself can solve a lot of problems for a lot of different people and we have existence proof of that. Getting an organization at scale to discover it to see it in that light and then to have an organizational culture embrace it. Certainly licensing is a part of that, but it's also about who in IT is responsible for it? How do we govern it? Where do we roll it out? Who is footing the bill when I do understand how to pay for it? Ryan Cunningham: At the end of the day, licensing is actually very simple which I know is a controversial opinion. You get a measure of it in Office. For extending Office, you pay for Enterprise data sources. There's two ways to pay. You pay per app or you pay unlimited, full stop. That's the license. Now, we do not do ourselves many favors when we have classically rolled that out. And I absolutely take your point that we have made the communication of that complex. Ryan Cunningham: And for a lot of customers, this is not a commodity expectation. We're at a point right now where everybody needs an email account and a productivity suite and Word processing and every seller needs a CRM license and those things are not necessarily controversial, it just becomes about what's the best price from the best vendor. Because they're mature products in mature markets. Ryan Cunningham: Low code is at a very different state of market maturity. So for a lot of people it's about not just understanding how our pricing is structured, but understanding organizationally for them how do they conceptualize ROI? How does the market offer these products and how do I evaluate that potential expense against the value I'm going to get out of it? I think in addition to making things like the licensing guide easier to read for people who do not have PhDs, I think it's also really about helping the market get more mature and seeing... We really genuinely believe this will become an expectation of organizations. Ryan Cunningham: If you go fast forward another couple years, if I can't rapidly innovate internally and I am dependent on a team of professionals to start from scratch every single time that I that I need a problem solved, that's going to be a major competitive disadvantage for organizations. And on the flip side, being able to have every information worker be able to do at least basic tasks extending their software and solving their own problems is increasingly going to be an expectation. Ryan Cunningham: We're not there yet from a market maturity standpoint. Not everybody sees it that way, but we've certainly seen enough proof of organizations already evolving to that point that we know that that's coming. So I think being able to get to that place is a journey for a lot of companies. It's then really the next phase for us of bringing the world to where we know it can be. Steve Mordue: I mean, you just look at some of the things in the past like the first Obamacare website debacle with all the millions of dollars they spent to basically build a website and then look at what it would have taken for somebody to pop that up on portals today. I mean, there's no compare. I mean, we've actually lost projects in the past because the people thought we didn't understand the scope because we were like 10% of what the other companies... So we clearly misunderstood the scope and they just misunderstood the value of a platform and what that does to a development cost and time cycle and everything. Ryan Cunningham: There are government entities that rolled out COVID testing solutions on Power Platform in literally weeks to tens of millions of citizens and had that go off without any major hiccup. You're right. We get back to that pressure test. It's like getting that to go to scale and to help more people see it that way and be able to expect that from their software. That's really the next mountain to climb. Steve Mordue: I think the two challenges we've had around licensing are that Power Apps versus Power Apps. We've got these two products that really are our different products that share the same name and that puts some confusion in customers where they think they already have Power Apps. Ryan Cunningham: Have it right. Steve Mordue: They don't understand why they have to go buy Power Apps or they have Power Apps. And the other one is the passes, the per user or the per app passes. Those are assigned in a different way than all the other licenses they have been using internally for years. It's the only thing that's assigned that way. So it's a different process and they're looking at how do I do this? I've assigned licenses all the time. I don't understand how to do this. Steve Mordue: Those are two spots if you could personally take as a favor to me, go clean up the pathways [crosstalk 00:59:39] on those to make that as smooth as possible for people to understand, that would be that would be awesome. Ryan Cunningham: And that feedback is well heard across the market. I mean, we are at the pace that we were trying to do some work on the first problem to clarify really Power Apps for Office from our apps for stand-alone. And then separately the per app concept is a really powerful concept and actually a lot of organizations have embraced it. I don't know if I'm allowed to say this. there's more monthly active usage of apps on a per app license today and this has been true for many months than there were on either the older two licensed models, right? Steve Mordue: Sure. Ryan Cunningham: I mean it hunts for a lot of people when they can realize, "Oh, hey. This is a way for me to apply the value of the platform to a use case without having to go have this broader discussion about committing the entire organization to an unlimited number of apps." Steve Mordue: And just a difference of cost Ryan Cunningham: It's a different concept for people. Steve Mordue: And just a difference of cost. At $40, I can afford to have 10 people use this. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Steve Mordue: At $10, well I can afford to have 40 people use this. So suddenly, strictly related to cost, you're going to see that usage explode on those lower cost licenses because those are people now using an app that weren't going to be able to use it before. They weren't going to justify the expense for that level, that tier if you will. You start getting into 10 bucks, I mean that's pretty much anybody in the organization you could justify 10 bucks for. Now suddenly, everybody has an app. Ryan Cunningham: Yup. We've seen a number of customers already even though this has been in market only about a year. Start there and then very quickly realize, actually we want unlimited [inaudible 01:01:25] people through the transition is a phase as well. Steve Mordue: This is something that you take in account as a builder of apps also if you're wanting to try and build for that, you build your apps understanding the licensing structure and you design for it. So listen, Ryan, I appreciate you taking this time out of your, obviously not busy afternoon. Ryan Cunningham: [inaudible 01:01:50] Steve Mordue: A rare not busy afternoon for you, I'm sure. I'm feeling very lucky to have caught you when I did. Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Steve Mordue: Any closing thoughts? Ryan Cunningham: Hey, keep doing what you're doing, Steve both being a rock in the community and also pushing us on the platform to make it better. I think ultimately we see this as a thing we're doing together and I mean that really genuinely. We don't sit in an ivory tower. [inaudible 01:02:18] When we do, we make plenty of blunders, but I think this thing we are building is bigger than lines of code. It's a mindset and I think the more that the community embraces it, the faster we go. So I really appreciate you and everybody that is hopefully going to listen to this someday and participate. Steve Mordue: There'll be thousands listening. There usually are. So don't worry. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, 100%. Thanks for the call, Steve. Steve Mordue: All right. Cool, man. Talk to you later. Ryan Cunningham: Be well, peace.    

Brand new baby MVP Matt Collins-Jones talks about his top 4 tools for creating Power Automate Flows, and the tools that we wish existed. Be sure to check out Matt's YouTube channel!  Lot's of great content! Tools Discussed: FetchXML Builder - https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/Cinteros.Xrm.FetchXmlBuilder/  Level Up - Level Up Chrome/Edge Store Metadata Browser - https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/MsCrmTools.MetadataBrowser/  Flow to Visio - https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/LinkeD365.FlowToVisio/  Matt's Info and other links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcollins-jones/  Twitter: @D365Geek YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MattCollinsJones  Website: https://www.d365geek.co.uk/  Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ | @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ | @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Interview with Jenny Farenden Fantastic Services is a technology-driven provider of professional cleaning and property maintenance services. Founded more than 11 years ago, the company now operates on 3 continents. The Fantastic 360-degree happiness philosophy revolves around the simple idea of delivering outstanding service experience for all customers, franchisees and employees. Revolutionising the service industry through implementing custom-built digital technology solutions, the business is powered by a ground-breaking XRM system, service and customer apps, and automated platforms for service management.

"We're not looking for a Sales solution", said the person on the other end of the phone call. I have heard this many times. While those of us in the Power Platform arena know that Sales is only one of the business problems we can solve with the tools today, many still think "Sales" when they hear Dynamics 365. Once more from the top I have previously explained some of the evolution of what was formerly known as CRM, at least as it relates to Microsoft's offerings.... but I will try once more in super-layman's terms. Up until just a few years ago, Microsoft had a product known as Dynamics CRM. It was a Sales focused solution, primarily aimed at Salesforce.com as the market leading competitor. Originally only available as an on-premise product, meaning it was installed somewhere on machines you owned or controlled, it became available as a SaaS offering in 2011. As a SaaS offering, this meant that it was now running from machines that Microsoft owned and operated, and the application was made available for you to use via a web browser. Not dissimilar to how you use LinkedIn, Facebook or even Salesforce. This is essentially what Cloud means. The Salesforce Clouds Salesforce, which also started as a Sales focused Application, although cloud from the very beginning, started to see opportunities in adjacent markets quite a while ago. They created some new "Clouds", there came the "Sales Cloud", "Service Cloud", "Marketing Cloud" and more recently, the "Commerce Cloud". Clearly redefining what CRM, and Salesforce was, to encompass a much broader spectrum of business solutions. Microsoft followed suit. Clouds vs Apps Where Salesforce created distinct "Clouds" for their expansion, Microsoft created distinct "Apps". The difference in approaches is not easy to grasp, but fortunately, it is not important to grasp either. Looking at it from the Microsoft side, their Dynamics application had spread out some to include some post-sale capabilities, primarily around servicing activities. While Dynamics was always highly customizable, it was delivered with a very specific kind of business model in mind. First, it was assumed that you sell things, directly to customers, and most likely those customers were businesses (B2B). It was also assumed that you had some sort of incoming Leads from somewhere, and that your sales process began there. It was assumed that your made contact with these "Leads" to determine their interest, and if interested, you would convert them into "Opportunities, together with an Account and Contact record. While at the Opportunity stage, it was assumed that you would create "Quotes", and in order to create Quotes, it was assumed that you needed a Product Catalog. Once a Quote was accepted, it was assumed that you would create an "Order" and close the Opportunity as "Won". Once the Order was fulfilled, it was assumed that you would want to create an Invoice to get paid. Now that the "thing" has been sold, it was assumed that you would want to offer some kind of post-sale support with Case Management, and of course you would want SLA management for your support staff. Microsoft made a lot of assumptions about how a business would work in their Dynamics CRM offering. In my 20 years in CRM, I never met one that fit. Bending and Molding I am not sure if it was there from day one, or if it came along later, but the XrM capabilities are what made Microsoft's Dynamics CRM a viable product. Dynamics' XrM capabilities were similar to Salesforce's Force.com capabilities. Basically they both gave the ability to customize the offerings... significantly This was a good thing because neither of their offerings fit any customer. The general public was seeing basically Sales solutions offered by Microsoft, oblivious to the fact that they could be completely customized into something totally unrelated to sales. It was even tougher for Salesforce to shake the "Sales" only stigma, since it was baked into their name. You would have thought that Microsoft could have taken advantage of this opportunity, but until recently, the product was lead by a bunch of idiots, who were so focused on catching up with Salesforce, they missed the clear opportunity to just pass them. Back to customizability: over the years, customization became a very big business. Working with skilled Partners, customers were taking the products offered by Microsoft and turning them into completely different things, like Member Management solutions for Associations, or Grant Management solutions for Non-Profits, or Franchise Management solutions, etc, The list is endless of what has been done to "CRM" with the XrM customization capabilities. Breaking shit apart Several years ago, Microsoft embarked on a journey to separate their Dynamics capabilities, first from each other, and then from their underlying platform. It's a long story, that is still ongoing, and I have written about it several times in the past, so I will cut to the chase here. Dynamics CRM is no more, instead we have several Apps that carry the Dynamics brand. Dynamics 365 for Sales, Dynamics 365 for Service, Dynamics 365 for Marketing, etc. Sounds eerily similar to Salesforce's clouds. In the same time frame of releasing these finished applications, Microsoft also made the underlying platform that they are all built on, available as a separate product. Again, Salesforce was there first, with a "platform only" offering quite a while ago. More on that shortly, but Microsoft also kept building on their apps, adding intelligence and a whole slew of capabilities. Sadly, the original  "assumptions" that Microsoft made about how businesses operate, still dominate their offerings, but luckily XrM is still available to make them actually fit. Power Platform Microsoft's "Platform-only" offering is called the Power Platform. Think of it as a smorgasbord of ingredients, but there is no finished stew. If you want a finished stew, then you could look at Microsoft's "finished" apps. But in my experience, all of those required significant tweaks to the ingredients to get right for anybody. "Tweak" is probably not the right word... decapitation is probably closer. This is not a knock on Microsoft's first-party apps at all. As aspirational showcases of modern technology, they are pretty awesome. But most customers I run into have neither the time, patience, budget or need for much of that "aspiration". This customer needs to go straight to the Power Platform. In most of the cases I can recall, we spent more time modifying the first-party apps to fit customers needs, than if we had just started from scratch. So, in almost every case, that is what we are doing today. Long Live the Platform Microsoft's Business Applications Group is on the odd position today of potentially eating it's own head. When you hear them discuss the Power Platform, it is with great zeal that they talk about its capabilities to solve "small" problems. There is clearly a concern about cannibalization of their first-party apps coming from the platform, either by customers or ISVs. While they continue to position Power Platform as a solution to small problems, the only reason it could not solve the biggest problems that exist today, would be artificial limitations that Microsoft may place on it, to protect their first-party apps. As we continue to solve bigger customer challenges with the platform approach, I sense a tightening coming from Microsoft. Is Dynamics 365 Dead? My co-host on our weekly live show, and good friend, fellow MVP Mark Smith, once publicly proclaimed "Dynamics 365 is Dead". This sent shockwaves through the community at the time, (Somehow I even got blamed for it), but he was only voicing what a lot of us were thinking, the day Microsoft made the decision to open the platform. So is Dynamics 365 Dead? That's a good question... I know for myself, a customer has to have a pretty specific need, that is only met by one of Microsoft's pre-made apps, before I would suggest even looking at them. However, Microsoft continues to invest heavily into capabilities and marketing of their apps. I am sure it would be quite a financial blow to Microsoft's Business Applications Group if everybody dropped their pricey apps, and built their own on the inexpensive platform. But I, for one, am mostly suggesting they at least explore just that. Interestingly, I seem to recall Microsoft telling their partners a few years ago, that moving to the cloud was going to hurt partners a bit financially in the short term, but it was the future.

Colin, Nick H and Nick D (CNN) chat with MVP Jim Novak about tools used when working with Power Apps portals projects.   Jim Novak is a Technical Architect with deep experience with Dynamics CRM/xRM and custom .NET application development working in projects for the United States government, education and healthcare industries.   Twitter: @crmdevjim Website: https://futurezconsulting.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesnovak/ Other links: https://www.xrmtoolbox.com https://www.bootstrap-live-customizer.com/ https://github.com/WaelHamze/xrm-ci-framework https://abvogel.com/2019/08/13/Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data/

Colin, Nick H and Nick D (CNN) chat with MVP Jim Novak about tools used when working with Power Apps portals projects.   Jim Novak is a Technical Architect with deep experience with Dynamics CRM/xRM and custom .NET application development working in projects for the United States government, education and healthcare industries.   Twitter: @crmdevjim Website: https://futurezconsulting.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesnovak/ Other links: https://www.xrmtoolbox.com https://www.bootstrap-live-customizer.com/ https://github.com/WaelHamze/xrm-ci-framework https://abvogel.com/2019/08/13/Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data/

Xledger began in 2000 as a response to overly complicated and costly on-premise ERP systems, with a vision to simplify business management and make ERP capabilities accessible to enterprises of all sizes. Xledger’s mission is to empower ambitious companies to prosper. We achieve this via three value pillars: INSIGHT makes complex financial data accessible to decision makers as actionable information; AUTOMATION increases efficiency in business processes through alignment with best practices; and SCALABILITY yields freedom and control by providing an out-of-the-box solution that is configurable to each customer’s needs. Xledger is the most comprehensive and automated business management solution in the cloud. It begins as a highly flexible accounting system, then adds so much more, such as sophisticated reporting, billing, purchasing, inventory, payroll, project and time management, XRM, document management, donor/member management, and integrated banking. Available in more than 20 languages and seamlessly handling worldwide currencies, Xledger enables companies to easily and effectively manage multiple business units and legal entities no matter where they are located in the world all from a single community cloud solution. Xledger is a truly unified system with impressive functionality at a reasonable cost. Xledger Inc is proud to make Colorado Springs, Colorado our home. However, used by more than 8000 companies in over 50 countries, Xledger’s community is truly global, and we delight in serving the needs of organizations around the world. Empowering leaders to make quality decisions. Empowering doctors to better diagnose and treat patients. Empowering teachers to innovatively engage students. Empowering governments to serve well. Empowering supply chains to function smoothly. Empowering breakthrough ideas. Empowering relief where it matters most. Empowering ambitious organizations to prosper. Xledger – empowering ambition. https://xledger.com https://twitter.com/XledgerUSA https://www.facebook.com/xledgerusa

Episode 88: Markus Erlandsson talks to Daryl LaBar from Gap Integrity and Jonas Rapp from CRM-Konsulterna about Early Bound Generator Vs Latebound Constants Generator where Jonas and Daryl battle to settle which tool is better. Links: https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/DLaB.Xrm.EarlyBoundGenerator/ https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/Rappen.XrmToolBox.LateboundConstantsGenerator/ https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/DLaB.Xrm.VsSolutionAccelerator/ CRM SDK on .Net Core https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Pro-Dev-ISV/Announcing-the-net-Core-SDK-for-Common-Data-Service-CDS-External/m-p/470035#M1745 Daryl: https://github.com/daryllabar/DLaB.Xrm.XrmToolBoxTools https://twitter.com/ddlabar https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR7naI_fY4LbY-TO_nLMTYA Jonas: https://github.com/rappen https://twitter.com/rappen https://linkedin.com/in/rappen

As I think back to past customers of Dynamics 365, not all of them were successful. The challenges that brought them to Dynamics 365 were real enough, but at the time we only had one solution to try and solve them with. I would love to snap my fingers and take Power Apps back in time. Sledgehammers Dynamics 365, borne out of it's predecessor, Dynamics CRM Online, is a software marvel. I'm talking specifically in this post about the "CRM" side of Dynamics 365. For a midsized to large business, D365 has all of the tools you would need to transform your entire operation. XrM was a blessing and a curse. In layperson's terms, XrM was the capability to customize almost any of the significant out-of-the-box capabilities to meet organization specific needs in a highly targeted and relevant way. XrM was also the path utilized to "Extend" D365 to solve other problems not contemplated by the out-of-the-box capabilities. It is a powerful combination that can be brought to bear on almost any business problem. The Curse Over the years, many Dynamics 365 partners became very proficient with XrM. As a result, D365 became a solution to "anything", not just Sales or Service related issues. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. A customer has a business issue, not related to any of the out-of-the-box capabilities, no problem, we can solve it with XrM! And so it begins, provision an instance, hide most of the out-of-the-box capabilities, and start building custom capabilities. Or, maybe to save some time, we'll re-purpose some of the OOB capabilities, and contort them to fit the requirements, sorta. It's one thing to modify the Opportunity capabilities to better fit a customer's specific Opportunity requirements, even if modified heavily, it's another thing to re-purpose the Opportunity process to solve for Asset Tracking. As a result there are a lot of "bastard" deployments in the wild. Commitment Many well-intentioned partners, offered D365, planning on extensive use of XrM, as a solution to many customers' non-sales or service related problems. Could it solve those problems? Yes! But never as easily, or quickly or cost efficiently as anticipated. Trying to build a custom solution within D365 to a unique problem, is like doing laps in a crowded pool. Your route from start to finish will end up being far from a straight line. For some customers the cure was worse than the problem. All partners have experienced the customer who eventually pulled the plug on the effort. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to get the XrM capabilities in an empty pool? Power Apps Over the past couple of years Microsoft has been rolling out Power Apps, now part of the Power Platform. You may have seen it pop up in your Office 365 environments, you may have even played with it. That is really one face of Power Apps. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom decided to use the same "Power Apps" name for another, completely different, solution. I personally put this at the top of my Dumb Decisions list... but that's another story. The Power Apps you might have seen or used in Office 365 are what are called "Canvas" Power Apps. If you look at a SharePoint list online, for example, you may have seen the Create Power App button, which if clicked, will automatically create a "Canvas" Power App from your list. As a result, a significant number of customers feel they are familiar with Power Apps, I know because I talk to them all the time, but they are only familiar with half of Power Apps, oblivious to the other face of Power Apps. Model-Driven What a shitty product name, or rather qualifier of a product name. Even when I try and explain it to customers, they are confused, because of what they think they already know. Microsoft really botched this one. I know that the plan was that these two completely different things would eventually converge, but giving them both the same name in the meantime was a huge mistake. Customers are thoroughly confused. It's not like Microsoft is afraid to change names, they do it unnecessarily all the time. As I am writing this, they are announcing a name change for "Office 365", a well-known and understood product, to "Microsoft 365", a name that was already in use for something completely different. For a really smart company, they can be quite stupid sometimes. XrM in an Empty Pool Model-Driven Power Apps are the XrM capabilities, in an empty pool. What I would give to go back in time to those customers who pulled the plug on D365. This was the product they actually needed at the time. But... it did not exist, so there's that... maybe I would have just suggested they wait a couple of years. What we have available today is an empty pool, with a low-to-pro code development platform sitting on top of it. We no longer have to waste time and money emptying the pool, or dodging big floats. Time to Value has been slashed. Development costs have been slashed. Time to ROI has been slashed. There's just a hell of a lot of slashing going on. A Big Ask If you are one of those customers, who went down the D365 path and wasted a lot of time and effort, only end up with nothing, I am aware that suggesting you to take a look at something else is a big ask. But, if you still have the problem, Microsoft may have caught up with your needs with Power Apps. Umm.. the other Power Apps.    

In this episode, Jonas and Daryl walk through Jonas' newest tool for the XrmToolBox, the UML Diagram Generator.  We also invite Reece Campbell, a beta user of the tool, to talk through his experience with using it. PlantUML and it's features Shorten the XrmToolBox to XBox? What advantages/disadvantages it has over the Entity Relation Diagram Creator Daryl makes plea for free testing Would the real D La B please stand up?   Links UML Document Generator: https://jonasr.app/UML PlantUML: https://plantuml.com/ VS Code Extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jebbs.plantuml Reece Campbell: https://ramblingreece.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/ramblingreece https://www.linkedin.com/in/reececampbell/ -- Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

É isso aí cyberatletas episódio bônus no ar. Essa semana conversamos um pouco com o XRM sobre o Circuito… Não, pera agora é só CLUTCH! Sobre o Clutch e sua estrutura. O maior campeonato de CSGO do Brasil, a Série A, está de volta e voltou com tudo. Acompanhe o que mudou no campeonato além do nome, o novo formato, a premiação, um pouco sobre as organizações e como elas ganham dinheiro dentro do Clutch. Isso e muito mais é só aqui no PODCAST OFICIAL DO CLUTCH - A PRIMEIRA DIVISÃO DO CS BRASILEIRO! O Clutch Cast CS.

In this episode, we invite Sara Lagerquist, MVP and vocal proponent of low code/no code solutions, to give us some of the top tools that she uses.  In this episode Sara shares the following tools: Bulk Workflow Execution by Andy Popkin https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/AndyPopkin.BulkWorkflowExecution/ Attribute Manager by Daryl LaBar https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/DLaB.Xrm.AttributeManager/ Easy Translator by Tanguy Touzard https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/MsCrmTools.Translator/ FetchXML Builder by Jonas Rapp http://fxb.xrmtoolbox.com/ Related Records Analyzer by Jonas Rapp https://jonasr.app/2018/06/rra-intro/ User Security Manager by Nishant Rana and Prashant Maurya https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/PKM.XRMToolBox.UserSecurityManager/ View Layout Replicator by Tanguy Touzard  https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/MsCrmTools.ViewLayoutReplicator/ Shuffle Builder and Shuffle Runner by Jonas Rapp and Innofactor https://jonasr.app/2017/04/devops-i/ https://twitter.com/lagerquistsara https://saralagerquist.com/   Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

This episode is brought to you by KingswaySoft. Nick and Colin are joined by special guest Eugene Van Staden. Eugene, Colin and Nick discuss building a set of ALM/DevOps tools for PowerApps Portals deployments. Learn about the importance of healthy ALM, the available open-source tools and the challenges of applying automated DevOps to Portal projects. Show Notes and Links: Eugene's contact info: eugenevs@outlook.com https://github.com/hmdvs - Eugene will eventually post some of his templates and companion app samples there. 2019 State of DevOps Report https://puppet.com/resources/whitepaper/state-of-devops-report Andrew Vogel's tools: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data.PowerShell/1.3.0 https://github.com/abvogel/Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data Scott Durow's Task Runner https://github.com/scottdurow/SparkleXrm/wiki/spkl Microsoft Doc's Configuration Data Migration Tool https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/portals/migrate-portal-configuration Music: www.purple-planet.com  

This episode is brought to you by KingswaySoft. Nick and Colin are joined by special guest Eugene Van Staden. Eugene, Colin and Nick discuss building a set of ALM/DevOps tools for PowerApps Portals deployments. Learn about the importance of healthy ALM, the available open-source tools and the challenges of applying automated DevOps to Portal projects. Show Notes and Links: Eugene’s contact info: eugenevs@outlook.com https://github.com/hmdvs - Eugene will eventually post some of his templates and companion app samples there. 2019 State of DevOps Report https://puppet.com/resources/whitepaper/state-of-devops-report Andrew Vogel’s tools: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data.PowerShell/1.3.0 https://github.com/abvogel/Microsoft.Xrm.DevOps.Data Scott Durow’s Task Runner https://github.com/scottdurow/SparkleXrm/wiki/spkl Microsoft Doc’s Configuration Data Migration Tool https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/portals/migrate-portal-configuration Music: www.purple-planet.com  

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I try and sneak up on Charles Lamanna again, but no dice. Recently promoted to CVP, Citizen Application Platform I wanted to see if I could get Charles to help clear up some of the confusion around licensing and API limits that seem to be the topic of the day. He was more than happy to help me set the record straight. Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Wednesay at 11AM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Full transcript follows: Charles Lammana: Hey Steve. I bet you're recording this, aren't you? Steve Mordue: Charles, you know I am. Did I catch you at a time where you could talk for a little bit? Charles Lammana: Yeah, for sure. I'm about to go to dinner, but I'd talk to you anytime Steve. Steve Mordue: I appreciate that. So we're recording this on Friday the 13th, that's ominous. And right now there's a lot of questions out there in this space, and I thought, "You know what?" I'm going to grab you and see if we can't answer some of these, for some of these folks. I've been fearlessly FUD fighting for the last week or two. I thought I'd just go grab the horse and get his mouth, so. Charles Lammana: Sounds good. I can guess what you're fighting, but I'll let you share that first. Steve Mordue: I will. Before I do that, congratulations on the promotion. Charles Lammana: Thank you very much. Steve Mordue: Corporate Vice President of Citizen Application Platform, right? Charles Lammana: Yeah, that's right. I think I dilute the Microsoft CVP brand a little bit, but- Steve Mordue: I don't think so. I don't think so. Are you still seeing that girl that you introduced me to a little while back? Charles Lammana: Yes, yeah. And you know what's funny is, the place I'm going to dinner is actually the same place that we ran into each other- Steve Mordue: Oh yeah? Well I guess she chose wisely then, in selecting a boyfriend. Should we read anything into the Citizen being part of the title? Charles Lammana: So Citizen Application Platform's been the name for our team for a while and the main focus there is not like citizens of the United States or any country, but instead that anybody, even if they're not a professional developer, can use the Power Platform to go create applications, create dashboards, create flows and so on. That low code element. So that's the real focus, why we have the Citizen Application Platform. Steve Mordue: So we're already shortening that to CAP? Charles Lammana: Yeah. Steve Mordue: You guys calling it CAP inside too? Charles Lammana: Yeah, it is a mouthful. Steve Mordue: It is. Charles Lammana: And people ask me, do I work with the government or something. But nothing related to the government, just making it so anybody can build apps. Steve Mordue: So I think that a lot of the questions, of course, are coming around from the Dynamics 365 guys. It's interesting because we used to all be Dynamics 365 guys and now there are Dynamics 365 guys and Power Platform guys. And they overlap some, but there's clearly a path for those like myself and others that have decided, "We're going to go Platform all the way." And a lot of the partners that are still heading down the first party all the way, and some of the confusion that's out there around some of the new licensing things. The two things that keep popping up on me and Mark's live weekly show, have you heard that yet by the way? Charles Lammana: I haven't, but I'll check it out. If you guys are talking about licensing, I got to hear what you're saying. Steve Mordue: Oh, we're just saying wrong stuff I'm sure. But licensing and of course the API stuff popped up and I've been responding to both those and I realized that one of the things I was saying might not have been correct on the new per app licensing. Now you know that that $10 per app licensing is blowing up everybody's head, right? Everybody's thinking, "This is crazy. This is going to blow up the market. How can anybody make any money?" But clearly this is a scale play and I was just under the assumption, I guess because of the way I was reading this stuff, that that $10 license was for a single app that you just built on the platform. And Ryan Cunningham confirmed with me the other day that no, you could use this on the Dynamics 365 instance as well if a user's only using a single app that doesn't use any restricted entities. Steve Mordue: Well there's hardly any restricted entities in the sales app and I thought, "Well, I mean you're just going to have a bunch of people that are going to pull out a couple of things in the sales app they may not be using anyway and start paying 10 bucks instead of 95." Clearly that's not the intent. Was he wrong, am I wrong or is there just this idea that, "You know what? We're going for scale at 10 bucks and everything else, get out of the way"? Charles Lammana: You're both right, but let me inject an additional piece of information. So even in a Dynamics instance you can use the new per app per user license, that's $10 for power apps, as long as you don't use any of the restricted entities or any of the application IP, like a schedule board or something from field service. The piece of information that's missing is that list of sales restricted entities as part of the new per app per user license, there's a few more entities from sales that will be added to that list. Steve Mordue: Now it starts making a little more sense. Yeah, because I was thinking whoever owns the sales app must be crapping their pants over there at this stuff. You've got to throw him something to keep his PNL going. Are you at liberty to say what those are yet? Charles Lammana: Yeah, so I don't have the exact list off the top of my head, but I mean the intent is exactly as you described with the list that we have. And that is to make sure that if you are using the dynamics for sales application IP, which has a whole giant engineering org working on it, then it's only fair to pay Dynamics 365 for sales licenses or we'll go purchase them. So it's not going to be contact, but the ability to create an opportunity or manage opportunities, that probably should be restricted, if that makes sense. Steve Mordue: Yeah. That's where it starts kicking into the logic and certainly those aren't components of the platform by itself, whereas contact is, and that's where you start bringing in the Microsoft vetted logic around all that stuff. So that makes sense. That makes sense. Plus it's good for me, as you know, from what we're doing, I'm sitting here thinking, "Oh great, everybody's just going to go start paying 10 bucks for the sales app and I don't have a business anymore," so I'm still good. Steve Mordue: On the API stuff, and I've been kind of comparing this, there's a lot of FUD out there and frankly I've probably created some in the past, I know, I've not always said positive things, but at least I said things that were true. And lately, every time you guys go and announce something, and I'm just picturing you guys sitting back there reading that thing a hundred times thinking, "Okay, this is going to be fine, right? Nobody's going to have a problem with this." And it pushes a publish button and all hell breaks loose. And I feel for you guys, I really do, especially when these folks just attack anything you say and try and turn it into the worst case possible scenario. And the API limits I think is the one that all I'm hearing people say is, "Open a contact record. It does 50 API calls," you know, they're clearly taking that conversation in a direction. And my understanding from you guys is that when you do things like this with these limits, you're looking at a fraction of the market that's outside of it. I mean 95% of the people out there today shouldn't even have to think about this. Is that a fair statement? Charles Lammana: That's exactly right. And I mean all the limits are a bit ... at this point Dynamics is such a big service with such a big surface area and so many customers, we can do pretty good quantitative analysis of what a typical user or a typical customer does. And we did that and that's where the API limits came from because our main focus, put very simply, we want basically all except the most sophisticated complex implementations to just require user licenses, because it's just such an easier conversation for the customer and Microsoft. I have a thousand sellers, I want a thousand sales apps, that's it, boom, done. You don't want to have to go architect, "How many API calls did they make? How many integrations do I have?" And basically our position is you shouldn't have that conversation if you're just going to do this, the vanilla sales workload or vanilla general power apps, workloads over CDS; you don't need to go even think about API calls. Charles Lammana: And we do that. We do it because there are customers who do use a lot of API calls and it is important to their implementation and they'd like additional API capacity where there's no way for them to purchase it from Microsoft today. So we have to have a limit and then we have to have a way to purchase incremental API calls in order for that model to work. But again, the idea is we're not selling infrastructure or PaaS, there's no cores, none of that stuff. We just want customers to be able to buy USLs for power apps, for Flow, as well as for Dynamics. Steve Mordue: Yeah. I think it kind of creates some fairness too because obviously we've had issues in the past with a certain segment of customers that are getting a lot more from the platform than intended and everybody else is using it as intended. So I can imagine if you've got some customer that, because of how they're using the platform or running their business or generating a zillion API calls, well they should be paying more. They're getting more out of it. They're doing more with it than the average customer who isn't. So I think it makes it a little more fair. I've always been annoyed at thinking that my customers or myself am subsidizing other customers overuse, you know? Charles Lammana: Exactly, yeah. Tragedy of the commons, right? That's what the problem is with the multi-tenant SAS. If people can use way more infrastructure at no incremental costs or has issues, we're just trying to shape that behavior. But I mean I'll own, from a Microsoft point of view, we could have done a lot more to more clearly communicate those changes and make it more obvious and provable that the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our customers will not be impacted. And we kind of view it, and it's kind of funny, we didn't really expect such a pushback on it, but we viewed it as just like that little asterix that you have with your cell phone or cable provider where when I get my internet from Comcast I don't think about how many gigabytes I used to download, but there is a limit. I mean it's really big and I bet like almost nobody hits it, but there is a limit at some point of internet download I can go do with my internet provider. But they have those same types of protections. But I just don't worry about it because it's not front and center. We should have done more to make it clear that that's the intent of these changes, to be that little asterix that you really don't have to think about unless you're doing something well outside the normal bounds. Steve Mordue: You know, and we had the same challenge with the storage when we tried to change the storage for the better. And when that first got announced all you heard was, "Storage is going up eight times," and everybody's thinking, "Oh my God." And you guys retrenched a little bit, came back with a little clearer story about how that would work and I'm sure some people are paying a little more, but none of my customers are. So that doesn't seem to have impacted but a fraction of customers also. Charles Lammana: Yep. Yeah. And a lot of those changes, our whole goal is we want our billing model to also not drive weird behavior or bad behavior that make it hard to implement. And the old storage instance cost model did that. So I mean that's why it was really important to change and some of the new API call models also do that. We just wanted to make it so if you build things the right way, the licensing and billing model will reward you for a more reasonable price. Steve Mordue: So you say you don't want to reward or create weird behavior, but we just launched a $10 skew that sits on a platform that has access to all of the XRM capabilities. If somebody was motivated enough and had enough budget they could essentially build the entire Dynamic 365. They wouldn't, and as I stand back and kind of look, from my perspective, haven't been probably one of the first people in there when there still was missing parts and seen them come, I've seen the portals come, we've seen the Outlook come, we've seen the accelerators now have CDS only versions, we're just seeing more and more stuff coming to the platform, that that's got an awful lot of appeal to people to ... I won't say do weird behavior, but who think, "I want to get off this $95 skew if I can." I mean what's the thinking inside on that? I mean that's got to be expected? Charles Lammana: Yeah, I think just our viewpoint would be if we ... I would say we are quite confident on the Microsoft side that the value and the intellectual property and the ongoing services and support and SLAs and integrations that come with the proper Dynamics applications can and will continue to command those prices. And it's not always $95, we also have Sales Pro and Customer Service Pro which are a cheaper price. And even if you use the pro license or the enterprise license, it also entitles you to a multitude of custom applications in that same environment, which the $10 per user license doesn't. Charles Lammana: So I think we feel pretty good about that value prop, and going back to the ... we don't want to do artificial things with our billing model. We think a platform for one app, $10 per user per month, that can unlock the entire world to build all their apps on that platform and we feel like that's the right price for it, the right level of cost between the customer and Microsoft. And we wouldn't want that statement, which we believe to be true, to go be limited because we also think that we can sell a finished SAS application in the case of sales or service for pro and enterprise at a higher premium. Charles Lammana: We think both of those things can exist and we will have blends. Like we will have customers who will repurpose their sales license for platform capabilities and we'll have customers who will use our platform license to go and try to create a mini CRM, and we think that's okay. I mean that's just their own calculation based on their value. But we're aiming for the 95 to 99% of the entire world where we think the value prop works pretty well. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I mean I know that when I look across our customer base there certainly is a significant percentage of those people that are heavily using a lot of those high value features that you talk about. And then there's a segment that just never did, they're just kind of using basic stuff, and those are going to be pretty simple candidates to say, "Hey, you know what? You're not using all this stuff, just drop down." Or try and do a sales job to get them to start using it, because the worst case scenario is they aren't using it and they feel like they're paying too much and then they just churn out. And I'd rather move them down and keep them on something that they want, maybe they grow back up. Steve Mordue: That's another story that's had a little confusion out there is that migration back and forth story. Now, my understanding today is of course if we start on CDS and the customer says, "Hey, this is pretty good, but I want to get some of those snazzy features in the first party," right now we're looking at a migration project, I think. Is that something that you guys think will be fixed or is it something that is a concern or something to think about, or are we just kind of looking at those as different customer types? Charles Lammana: No, I'd say we definitely don't want to require a data migration like it does today. We want to get to a proper model where ... because I think of CDS and the platform as almost like Windows OS, right? You buy the Windows OS and then you'd go buy all the apps that you want and install it on the OS. And it's not like if I buy Windows and I install Office, but then I want to install, I don't know, Adobe Acrobat or something, I have to go re-image my Window server, right? So we want to make that be the right layering, and that's really just an architectural legacy reason for being that way today. But longterm, absolutely, you want to allow it. So you start with CDS, you can add sales, you can add service, you can add field service, you could add Talent, you could add Project Online; you can add and mix and match all these different applications on top of that CDS environment. Charles Lammana: And we have early positive signs where that happens. We can't do it for the core CRM app yet, but low approvals, which is modeled as an XRM app and Project Online from Office 365, that's also an app installed on CDS. Those, we actually have many customers who start with a blank CDS and then end up with both of those applications installed in addition to Talent, which is also an app on top of CDS. All those three apps added incrementally, organically over time on top of CDS. So that works great, we just need to go make it so the core CRM also can do the same thing. And that's just some legacy reasons, which as you know, we've been on a journey the last year and a half to go clean up and we're kind of going piece by piece, like Outlook, then Activities and server-side sync are all just some examples where we're hammering against that, but we think we'll get there, no problem, in the foreseeable future. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I mean for what we've been trying to do with the RapidStart, the Outlook app was definitely something that we needed. I mean everybody was wanting something like that, so thank you for that. And you knew I was hammering you guys for it too. Charles Lammana: Yep. You would never let me forget it. I mean I wanted to make sure it was done before we had this phone call happen again, but ... Steve Mordue: No problem. You guys got it done. Appreciate that. Charles Lammana: Yeah. Yeah, and I've heard quite a bit about RapidStart, so it's great to see the traction of a third party app bill on top of the platform, it's really exciting for- Steve Mordue: Oh yeah, yeah, we're excited too. We're developing some now on top of the accelerators, so, and the ... you having much to do with the accelerator groups? Smith and- Charles Lammana: Yeah, so it's not directly out of my team but we collaborate very, very closely with them. But yeah, I mean accelerators are so key because the world increasingly is going to industry-based motions, like if I'm a financial institution, do I really have to rebuild all the financial services goo that goes on top of a CRM or CDS all the time? They don't want to, so the accelerator just provides a ton of value out of the box. Steve Mordue: Yeah. So they just, with the banking accelerator, I think it's the first one where they released a CDS only version and then some additional add on versions that might take advantage of some of the first party. And I was talking to James about that and he said there's a plan to kind of go back to the other ones. So as soon as they did that we took a look at that banking core, which is an accelerator, and put our accelerator on top of that accelerator, "That'll be real fast," and looking at trying to leverage those accelerators. I think that's going to be an interesting ... I'll be curious to see what the market does with something like that that's built on an accelerator. It'll be a good test for the market. Charles Lammana: Jjust on the accelerator bit, for Dynamics 365, our core customer engagement or CRM app, the accelerators have been absolutely key the last six months to drive business. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I've been hearing that. Charles Lammana: Financial services places, man, it's been a lifesaver for us because customers just love to see that fast time to value. And then so just we think that accelerators are going to be really important for the platform, for the Dynamics apps and for third party apps and building our ecosystem. Steve Mordue: You know, talking about data models and industry data models, what's the latest on ODI? Is that progressing as you had hoped? Is it going faster, slower or is it going to happen? What do you think, or is there too many people punching- Charles Lammana: It's advancing exactly at the paces we would want/expect, and I'll expand on what I mean by that. ODI is one of those super industry changing efforts and motions, and the reason it's industry changing is because we're bringing together so many companies like SAP, Adobe and Microsoft, that historically don't partner together and are built completely different stacks. We're bringing together all three companies to go do something, to create basically open data for our mutual and joint customers and a well-defined schema with a well defined set of entities to deliver a bunch of value to customers. So that's going to be a big deal when it lands. But just- Steve Mordue: It's a big rock. Yeah, it's a big rock to move. Charles Lammana: Exactly, three companies and 25 different applications, you mix in Dynamics, you mix in Office, you mix it Azure on the Microsoft side, it takes time. But when it arrives it's going to be a big deal. So ODI is absolutely something to pay attention to and it's something that continues to get significant investment from all three companies. It's taken its time, but I think it's going to be, whenever it arrives, it's going to be a really transformational item for our customers. Steve Mordue: Are you still driving that? Charles Lammana: I'm not. Robert Bruckner on our team is driving that. We support it from a platform, of course, just it's a lot of energy to go drive that process, so I'm glad we have Robert shouldering the burden. Steve Mordue: Yeah. So we've got October release coming right around the corner, and of course the advance news that has come out, all anybody has been focusing on, the FUD rakers, is on licensing and APIs. But if you take that part of the conversation aside, which I feel like we should have done in our conversation so far, I feel like we've accomplished that, to all but the truly ignorant, if we take that part aside, what do you think are some of the most exciting things people should be looking for in this release for Power Platform? Charles Lammana: I would say there's a few little things which I think are a big deal, and then there's a few big things. The little things are just usability improvements. If anyone's gone on and turned on the October release switch in the admin center, you will notice a significant modernization of the unified interface for model driven applications. There's much better grid density, much better density on forms, way less wasted white space. Better- Steve Mordue: And how long have we been hearing that, right? People complain about white space. So just glad to see that one finally get behind us. Charles Lammana: Oh man. And they're all little things, but you know what? We fixed the top 10 most painful user experience items of unified interface for October. And it's hard to do that in a way which doesn't trigger a whole bunch of retraining for our customers, so we had to be really thoughtful and diligent and you may not even realize it if you first turn it on, but just open it up side by side and we're really proud of those. Lots of little changes, lots of little pebbles that together really changed the experience for Dynamics and for model driven applications for power apps. So those are kind of the little ones. I'm very excited about that. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I was poking around in an October version and yeah, you could definitely feel it. It's not dramatic, it's not like, "Oh my God, where am I at?" You haven't lost anything. But you definitely sense right off the bat the density and then the features that have been added or ... yeah, I think you guys probably did a smooth job of that. So now tell us about the bumpy stuff. Charles Lammana: Yeah, the big stuff, the bulky stuff would be AI Builder is reaching general availability, as is PowerApps Portals. And we think that basically a modern platform needs to be able to support B2C, so external users to your company as well as anonymous access, and PowerApps Portals delivers that for the standalone PowerApps customers. And then we also believe the future of all applications and all automations and workflows is an intelligent, enriched experience and AI Builder delivers that for us. So you can use binary classification and prediction capabilities inside of AI Builder to make your power apps that are canvas model driven, but are built on top of CDS, make them much smarter. And that is one of my favorite features, it's just so amazing how easily you can enable a machine learning model without any data science or even developer background. Charles Lammana: And then also we have like things like the Forms Recognizer which actually parses digital paper, PDFs, JPEGs, what have you, extracts that information into a structured form and you can use that in your power app or your flow. And we're seeing unbelievable adoption, almost 50% of all AI Builder customers are using the forms understanding capability. It's so transformative for the back office, and if you haven't checked it out, just use it and then your mind will start racing; "My legal department, my finance department, my HR department, my procurement department, all of them can just work so much more efficiently if you can get forms recognized or working with the flow." So we think Portals and AI Builder are two big, bulky, meaningful changes for Power Platform. Steve Mordue: And AI Builder goes across, right? I mean you could stand up AI Builder on just bare CDS, you could stand it up on first party, it goes across, right? Charles Lammana: Yep, absolutely. And I apologize to anyone else from my team that may be listening that I didn't mention your feature that you worked on, but they're all important in the October release. But those are my three most favorite children. Steve Mordue: I definitely am hearing excitement about AI Builder and Portals is another one that's getting its share of FUD, something I read recently and some guy jumped on social talking about how Salesforce is so much cheaper because of this, that and the other. And unfortunately Dileep Singh happened to see what was going on, he jumped in and said, "Wait just a minute here," and kind of clarified some stuff right out there that reversed that whole story. So I'm looking forward to the day when we don't have a whole bunch of people out there watching your every move looking for the gotchas. Charles Lammana: Well I would say our goal at Microsoft is broad adoption, which I mean generally reflects in lower prices. I mean that's our goal. Like if you go to Microsoft's mission statement, empower everyone and every organization to do more, you can't do that with outrageous bespoke boutique pricing. So that definitely is not our objective and we certainly will learn and we make mistakes, but our push is we want everybody to be able to use this thing. I want everybody in the world to build apps and create flows and create power BI dashboards. Steve Mordue: Yeah, we'll leave the hidden costs to Salesforce, they're pretty good at that. So Charles, anything else you want to touch on? I've got, I don't know, millions of people that will be listening to this probably. Charles Lammana: I mean the biggest thing I would say is, and this is my kind of call to action every time I talk to you, and maybe it's an overwrought point at this point in time, but Power Platform, I mean our push is to go unify the Office and Dynamics communities with a single low code platform for all of Microsoft, and in the process make it so everybody in the world can have access to analyze data, create apps and build automations. So if you haven't checked out Power Platform as just Power Platform and outside of Dynamics or Office, go do it now. I think it's super amazing, in five minutes you can get value and just from the point of view of Microsoft as a company, it's just really critical to where we think the future's going. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I've had people ask me, "Where's the best place to start with Power Platform?" And I typically suggest Flow because it's about the easiest one to understand, the quickest of value and suddenly just light bulbs start going off. And when people are talking about building, because we are doing a lot of work with customers that are moving up from spreadsheets, that's a huge mountain out there for customers that are doing relatively complex business processes on a bunch of shared spreadsheets and torturing them. And we're generally recommending those customers go straight to a model driven app that has kind of that foundation, because then from there, you know, they can spring off with canvas flow, AI Builder, Power BI, have all those other things. And we're starting to get to a point where I'm getting crisped for that conversation because whenever you announce new things and stuff like that, nobody knows what we're talking about. The partners are behind and customers are behind-er. So, lots of education, a sales process now is an education process and probably will be for a while, because I don't see you guys slowing down. Charles Lammana: Never. We- Steve Mordue: Yeah, you're not even going to let us catch our breath before you're going to go do some stuff and keeping the partners hopping. Charles Lammana: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Well, Charles, I appreciate you taking some time. I knew I might be able to catch you here in the last hour of your work week and I was glad to do it. We'll be publishing this here, I don't know, probably Monday or something like that, get it out there pretty quick while everybody's got all the questions. Charles Lammana: Sounds good. Steve Mordue: So you have a good night, you mentioned something about dinner, so enjoy your dinner. Charles Lammana: Yeah, as always, great chatting, thanks Steve. Steve Mordue: Tell your girlfriend I said hi. Charles Lammana: Will do. Steve Mordue: All right, bye, guy. Charles Lammana: Bye for now-

In this episode, we interview the James Novak.  James is the maintainer of a slew of winform controls designed for the Xrm Tool Box, as well as the Document Template Manager Plugin. Dealing with Impostor Syndrome when sharing your work with the world Newlywed life Lazy Developers How good code can be easily repurposed. The "I can make it more extendable rabbit hole". James's favorite tools James's future tool desires   https://futurezconsulting.com/blog https://twitter.com/@crmdevjim https://github.com/jamesnovak/xrmtb.XrmToolBox.Controls https://github.com/jamesnovak/XrmDocumentTemplateManager Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

In this episode of firsts, we have our first return guest, the Xrm Wizard himself Magnus Sørensen (@XrmWizard), and the first time having two guests as Jordi Montaña also joins us as we take a deep dive into automated testing of Xrm/CDS/D365 CE! Why use a mocking framework specifically tailored for Xrm The biggest reason to do automated testing with plugins/workflows How client side service requests testing fits in  Deep dives into FakeXrmEasy, XrmMockup, and XrmUnitTest What are the differences How are they similar Which one should you choose https://twitter.com/@xrmwizard https://github.com/delegateas/XrmMockup/wiki   https://twitter.com/jordimontana https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordimontana/ https://dynamicsvalue.com https://github.com/jordimontana82/fake-xrm-easy   https://github.com/daryllabar/XrmUnitTest   Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

It seems clear to me from listening to people on social media, comments on my posts, and generally having an ear to the ground, that too many people, including many who should not be, are still confused about PowerApps... and wouldn't they be? A Quick Quiz. What is a PowerApp?  A Mobile Application you built on top of SharePoint  A Mobile Application you built on top of the common data service  A Mobile Application you built on top of Dynamics 365  A Custom Application you built in Dynamics 365  A Custom Application you built on the Common Data Service  A Custom Application you embedded into a Dynamics 365 Form  Something Else If you answered "all of the above", you get a gold star, but you're no closer to clarity. PowerApps Camps There are three primary camps for PowerApps as I see it. There are campers that come from the productivity side of the lake, where Office 365 and SharePoint live. We also have campers from the Dynamics 365 side of the lake, busily extending the Dynamics 365 applications with their own canvas and model-driven apps. Lastly, we have the Platform side of this apparently three-sided lake, using both canvas and model-driven paths to build apps from scratch on CDS. While these campers can hear the sounds of other campers across the lake, they seem to have little understanding of what the other campers are doing over there, even though they are each called "Camp PowerApp". I want to go a little deeper into the two of these camps that are part of Business Applications that I am familiar with. Someone else can speak to those productivity campers. A Custom Application I think the biggest confusion, for those of us in one or both of the Business Applications camps, are the distinction between items 4 and 5 from the quiz. "Building custom applications in Dynamics 365" vs. "Building custom applications directly on the Common Data Service". But Steve, aren't those both on CDS? Yes they are, but they got there via two distinct pathways, from opposite sides of the lake. They are not the same thing and different rules and licenses apply to each. Dynamics 365 Campers Let's face it, Model-Driven PowerApps are just XrM renamed. Everything you ever did with XrM in the past is now called PowerApps. Along the way a few more things happened, like the separation of the first-party apps from each other, and the introduction of the ability to make new role specific "PowerApps" by mashing up parts of the other first-party apps into your own concoction. Dynamics 365 brings all of the power and advanced capabilities you could want, including A.I., MR, and all the other acronyms. This is the deep end of the pool! The separation of the Apps from the underlying platform was of less importance to this camp, but actually spawned a whole new camp. Platform Campers These campers could care less about Dynamics 365. They are building their own custom apps directly on the same platform that sits under Dynamics 365. Are they masochists or anarchists? I guess a little of both. The "Platform" is actually the old XrM framework sitting on top of a database that is now called the Common Data Service (CDS). It is but a hollow shell of Dynamics 365, containing very little in the way of usable items, yet everything that is required to build as powerful an application as Dynamics 365. This is the deep end of the pool. Deep Ends If you were reading/listening closely, you heard me refer to both of these camps as the "Deep ends of the Pool". Extending the complex out-of-the-box functionality in the first-party apps requires significant skill and knowledge. But building functional, powerful and comprehensive applications on the platform also requires significant skill and knowledge. The shallow water in the middle is where "Citizen Developers" swim, creating their cute little widgets. Fuzzy Rules When it comes to the rules, there is clear separation, but for many it still seems fuzzy. Some common examples: "You can't use a Restricted Entity in a PowerApp!" This is incorrect, a clearer way to phrase this would be "If you are building a PowerApp on top of Dynamics 365, and you include in your PowerApp a restricted entity (for example the Incident entity), the user of your PowerApp will require a license that includes that entity (i.e Dynamics 365 for Customer Service)." This does not mean that you cannot build the app! Also, Restricted Entities have nothing to do with Platform Campers. There are no restricted entities in CDS without Dynamics 365. Similarly, with Team Member and it's restrictions. Team Member licenses are a type of Dynamics 365 license. Again, Team Member has nothing to do with the Platform Campers, only the Dynamics 365 campers need to be concerned with Team Member. "You cannot replicate the functionality of the first-party apps in PowerApps." This was previously true, and relevant only to the Platform Campers, but is no longer the case. For Microsoft to succeed with their Platform aspirations, it was clear they needed to eliminate any artificial restrictions, and they did. Fuzzy Licensing The recent announcement about the Platform License changes that I discussed in my last post, referenced this blog post by Charles Lamanna. Note that this post, and these licenses refer to "standalone" (aka Platform), and have nothing to do with Dynamics 365. This post and these licenses are for the Platform Campers only. You cannot use a Per App License with Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 has it's own licenses. Similarly, the retirement of the bundled Plan licenses for Dynamics 365 has nothing to do with Platform Campers. A Fuzzy Line The line between these two camps is very clear, yet at the same time, not very obvious. There is way too much "assuming" and lazy interpreting going on, leading to way too much misinformation, leading to way too much confusion. One way to help would be, if you don't know that what you are saying is correct... don't spit it out to the world as a fact. There is an old saying, "Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak up and remove all doubt".

In this episode, we interview Danish Naglekar (@DanzMaverick) the creator of the PCF-CustomControlBuilder. The features we want to be added How to get your tool "out there" Jonas does a Pull Request "On Air" Daryl mixes up the Guest with a breakfast food. https://twitter.com/@DanzMaverick https://www.linkedin.com/in/danishnaglekar https://github.com/Danz-maveRICK/PCF-CustomControlBuilder   Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

In this episode, we interview the Xrm Wizard himself, Magnus Sørensen (@XrmWizard) the keeper and maintainer of Delegate A/S's Open Source tools. How to register your plugins and plugin steps via fluent based code. How to include workflow and view state in your CRM solution Deployments Using Fiddler to do your client side dev work. Why using Typescript allows you to "Write it, and it just works" How to query Crm client side using a strongly typed querying methodology How to get all your developers "on the bus"?   https://twitter.com/@xrmwizard http://delegateas.github.io/   Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

In this episode, we interview Scott Durow (@ScottDurow) the creator of the Ribbon Workbench and Sparkle Xrm framework. The Birth of the Ribbon Workbench and it's architecture Smart Buttons The most common reason why something doesn't show in the Ribbon Why the Ribbon Workbench will die Why Scott got 200 support requests in a weekend All of Scott's knowledge is in the Sparkle Xrm Framework. Use it! What Microsoft could do to make Dev's lives easier Jonas is waiting for FetchXml to out maneuver SQL Scott defines his open source Ethos https://twitter.com/@ScottDurow https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdurow/ https://www.youtube.com/scottdurow http://www.sparklexrm.com/s/default.html https://www.develop1.net/public/rwb/ribbonworkbench.aspx https://develop1.net/public/post/2017/01/15/Smart-Buttons-in-the-Ribbon-Workbench   Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

In this episode (brought to you by D365UG), we interview Wael Hamze (@WaelHamze) the creator of multiple CDS/XRM CI frameworks and tools. Azure Devops Xaml vs PoweShell vs Yaml Managed vs unmanaged What's required for 100% automation of your ALM https://twitter.com/@WaelHamze https://www.linkedin.com/in/waelhamze/ https://waelhamze.wordpress.com/ https://github.com/WaelHamze/xrm-ci-framework https://github.com/WaelHamze/dyn365-ce-vsts-tasks https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=WaelHamze.xrm-ci-framework-build-tasks https://github.com/devkeydet/dyn365-ce-devops   Got questions? Have your own tool you’d like to share? Have a suggestion for a future episode? Contact Daryl and Jonas at cast@xrmtoolbox.com. Your hosts: Daryl LaBar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllabar/ @ddlabar Jonas Rapp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rappen/ @rappen Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Let me caveat this post with a couple of things; first, I am not an ERP partner, so I don't actually have a dog in this fight at the moment. Also, none of the following came from anybody at Microsoft, it is purely out of my own head and my opinions from my reading of the tea leaves as I see them. I am also sure I will piss a few people off, but that has not stopped me before. The Emperor's New Clothes In this fable, the Emperor is convinced that his new invisible clothes are "awesome", and as he walks naked around his kingdom, no one dares say otherwise. It reminds me of when I hear Microsoft attempt to calm the fears of GP partners today, by telling them that their platform is not a target for elimination. I'm not sure if the SL partners are even hearing anything. Da Cloud Over the last month Microsoft has been trading places with Apple as the world's most valuable company. The difference is Apple's growth rate is declining, where Microsoft's is increasing, so it won't be long before they "own" that spot. The way they got there was with the Cloud, starting with Office 365 eventually overtaking every other productivity application on the planet. Right on it's heels was Azure, from nowhere to neck and neck with Amazon as the largest cloud infrastructure provider on the planet. Next is Business Applications and the Power Platform. Given the success Microsoft has seen with cloud, do you really think they are going to continue to invest in, and support on-premise technologies for long? Hybrid The Hybrid story feels like making lemonade out of lemons. The fact that Microsoft can support you both on-premise and in the cloud is an advantage today, only because of laggards that have not moved to cloud yet. For some, it is a good story today, but that story will not be needed for too much longer. One of Microsoft's biggest on-going motions, is moving their on-premise customers to their cloud, once they have enough of them over there, the Hybrid story will fade away. The Tell In Poker, a "Tell" is something that a player does unconsciously, that an astute opponent can spot, that telegraphs their position. Back at the Directions NA conference in Orlando in September of 2017, Marko Perisic stunned the audience by saying something along the lines of "Tenerife" will become a white-label only solution. Again, with no dog in the fight, I wrote about it at the time, which started a shit storm. It was later that I learned that this concept was also being floated at Inner Circle, an NDA environment, at the same time Marko was speaking, at a public event. I don't know this for a fact, but I think Marko saw the writing on the wall and spoke out of turn, intentionally to rally the NAV troops.  What was the writing he saw? I think he saw Phillips looking at all of these ERPs and thinking out loud, "why do we need all of these?" Shortly after, Microsoft walked all of this back, which I wrote about here. It seems Marko was at least temporarily successful in thwarting this idea. Marko Go Bye Bye Marko recently announced that he is leaving Microsoft. Again, I have no knowledge, but I am guessing he was asked to leave. Tenerife, now Business Central, the cloud version of NAV, was brought under Muhammad Alam, the PM for F&O, the cloud version of AX. This is interesting. While for small or large customers there was clear distinction between the platforms, for customers of a certain size in the middle, Business Central and F&O competed. They both now fall under one leader... CDS & Codebases CDS 1 gave way to CDS 2, which was the existing XrM platform that sat underneath Dynamics Customer Engagement. Smart move, one less database to deal with. Since that move, CDS has sprouted many more branches: canvas apps, connectors, flow, platform licensing, industry accelerators and the list continues to grow. I think it is clear that CDS is a big bet for Microsoft, and the biggest so far for the Business Applications Group. Most of this is a common codebase, as well as common data model riding atop a common database. But then here we got these two ERPs, each with their own codebases and schemas, that want/need to jump on CDS, in a "real" way. Imagine a Common Database Schema under both your CRM and your ERP? I would call that a Power Platform! But we're not quite there yet. For the time being we have some hacky "connectors/integrators". Meat on the Bone Getting an ERP stood up fully, and directly on CDS is going to be a significant undertaking. Is Microsoft really going to do that twice, once for F&O and again for BC? Remember Phillips' first reaction when he walked in the door, "Why do we need more than one ERP?" Maybe we don't. Steve's Talking out of his Ass again I got a lot of heat from NAV partners the last time I even suggested this. I get it, you built an entire practice around the product, and you have a bunch of happy customers, and it generates a bunch of revenue. The same can be said for GP, and I think you have to thank Marko's herculean efforts for NAV not following GP towards the path to exit. But the product champion has left the building. I had also heard that F&O would never work for anything but the largest enterprise customers, which I think was a hope more than a reality. We proved with RapidStart that a small customer could be successful with an Enterprise focused app on the Customer Engagement side, so I am sure it could be accomplished similarly with F&O. Why F&O instead of BC? I could be wrong, but I sense that F&O has a shorter path to standing up on CDS than BC does, and could ultimately handle a broader range of customer segments. If in fact BC has a shorter path, then maybe this flips, but still... only one needs to go down that path. The codebases will continue to be different but the data will reside directly in CDS with a Common Data Model. Is this Project Green again? To be honest, I don't really know what "Project Green" was all about. The best I can tell, it was an effort to merge several products into one. So to those of you who think I am tossing out a new scary idea, clearly this idea has been around since long before myself, or Phillips were involved with Dynamics. I don't now if the Project Green effort actually failed, or just failed to launch, but clearly as far back as 2003 Microsoft was questioning the need for multiple ERP solutions. White Label? The white label idea, that was proposed in 2017, was not a bad option for attempting to keep the partner and customer base, while pulling NAV out of the mainstream D365 effort. NAV Partners did not agree, and blew up the phones over their potential loss of the D365 brand. With Marko leading the pitchfork wielding base, James clearly decided to save that fight for another day. Is that day coming soon? Focus The huge opportunity still exists for an end-to-end, fully connected enterprise solution, that spans Customer Engagement and a single ERP, all of which is extendable by citizen developers using the Power Platform. No other vendor has grabbed that brass ring yet, and Microsoft is reaching for it. How does more than one ERP solution make that easier to get to? It doesn't. Back in 2017, there were still a lot of things to sort out with CDS. Today, most of that is sorted, and I expect to see Microsoft focus hard and put the pedal to the metal on it. The last time I wrote about this, a bunch of NAV partners said things like, "You suck, you're wrong, I'm unfollowing you". They were at least temporarily right!    

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion lately about Dynamics 365 and PowerApps, particularly now with Model-Driven PowerApps. Microsoft's #FreightTrain, seems to have become a #BulletTrain of innovation, and sometimes things like "naming" and "explaining" lag behind. Let's see if I can unpack this one. Warning, this is a long post, so you might want to listen to it instead. The PowerApps Path When PowerApps burst onto the scene, it was a citizen developer tool for building simple apps using what is called the Canvas Model. The Canvas Model allowed you to "connect" to multiple data sources, including Dynamics 365, to build your App. It was not intended as a tool to build a complete business solution, but rather to build a mobile app for specific tasks. When the Common Data Service "pivoted" to the XrM platform, PowerApps and Dynamics 365 got mushed together, and a new concept was introduced for PowerApps called, "Model-Driven PowerApps". Microsoft often describes the difference between Canvas and Model driven as the ability to have either pixel precision in Canvas, or an "automatic" UI in Model Driven, but that really does not help you understand where the parts fit. What's in a Name Microsoft has struggled mightily over the years with product naming; not just in Business Applications, but across the company, product naming has been... let's call it,  less than perfect. Many partners and customers first became aware of Model-Driven PowerApps when they logged into the Solution Explorer one day, like they did everyday, and suddenly it said "PowerApps" in the header. "What the hell is this?". This was further evidence of the separation of the Apps from the platform. The Platform being CDS, and PowerApps being... what exactly? A Power Fork Today, the PowerApps brand means two distinct things, Canvas AND Model-Driven apps. These two "things" are for different purposes. The recent announcement that we will soon be able to embed a Canvas App into a Model-Driven App, has made things even more confusing for many people. One thing that PowerApps does not mean is Dynamics 365, these are not the same thing... well, not exactly. So what is Dynamics 365? What is "Power Platform? Why are there two Common Data Services? Okay, now I have gone and confused myself. Let's try another angle. A while ago I had some fun with a post I called "The Strategy Simulator", let's have some fun again, with another short-story. Steve Builds a Home I assume we are all familiar with a "Duplex". It's a residential building split in half, with two families living under one roof. Let's imagine that I want to build one, but not for two families, just for me. The reason will be clear in a minute. The first step I will do is to find a community, and I have selected one called Azure. Azure is a sprawling gated community, with rolling hills and miles of roadways, underground power grids, water systems, lakes, ponds ,etc., with many neighborhoods within it. I had looked at a couple of other communities; Amazon and Google. Amazon was an enormous gated community, but it did not have the rolling hills, it was dead flat as far as the eye could see. While there were miles and miles of roads, I did not see any amenities. The homes all looked exactly the same, like one of those old movies they showed to kids in school in the 50's, simulating a nuclear bomb leveling a neighborhood of fake homes. I pulled into, and then immediately left, the Google community, it looked like it was just getting started as none of the roads were yet paved, and the gates were unmanned. The construction workers I saw in there all looked like 60's era hippies, that did not appear to be in any hurry. So anyway, back in the Azure community, I saw a lot of interconnected neighborhoods, some of these were gated also. Gated within Gated seems like overkill on security, but I guess there are a lot of paranoid people in the world. I ultimately selected a lovely lot in the "Business Applications" neighborhood, because the neighbors all looked a lot like me. Business Applications is a fast growing neighborhood, which is adjacent to the huge "Productivity Applications" neighborhood, and they both share a lot of amenities, like the golf course, clubhouse and pool. The next step was to pour a foundation on my new lot. The left side of my foundation will be poured with "Common Data Service for Apps", and the right side will be poured with "Common Data Service for Analytics". While these halves are indeed different, for my purposes at this stage they look the same. They're both flat, with lots of pipes stubbed up out of them. There is also a vertical wall splitting the two halves of my duplex, and it has a lot of pipes pushed through it. At this time, this foundation does not "do" anything, I can't live here yet.. I can't even cook an egg. What I have so far is the CDS Platform for the "Power Platform", which in turn sits on the Azure Platform, all of which does nothing on its own. I step onto the left side of this foundation. There are a ton of pipes sticking up through the floor, but first I'll take a look at the ones poking through the wall. I walk up to the biggest one which has a label on it, "Power BI". It is so big I can stick my head through it to the other side and see the Common Data Service for Analytics floor. The slab on that side looks different, it seems a lot more porous, and still appears to be... liquid, like it will never harden. I pull my head back, and look at the other pipes through the wall, each of them is called "something Insights". It is clear that the right side is for large-scale number crunching of massive amounts of data that will eventually get pushed back and forth through these pipes. I turn my attention back to the floor, on the left side of the wall where I am standing. Scanning the floor of the left side there are so many pipes of different sizes, it is hard to even walk without tripping. Around the perimeter edge are small green pipes every few inches, hundreds of them. I take a closer look... "Twitter Connector", "BaseCamp Connector", "Dropbox Connector", etc. There is a second row around the perimeter, just inside of the first one, I see they are all labeled "Future Connector". About halfway down the left edge I see a big pipe labelled: "Connection to Productivity Applications Neighborhood". This is clearly going to be one of those new "Connected" homes. The rest of the floor is covered with steel plates embedded in the slab, with threaded rods sticking out of them. None of them appear to be marked, but clearly, they are here for something. A big truck with a flat-bed trailer pulls up out front, and I head out to see what's up. I see on the truck door a sticker that says, "Apps, Tools and Beyond".  Interesting... it looks like the trailer's bed is filled with Appliances of various sizes. Most of them have these steel base plates with holes drilled in them, that I assume marry up to the steel rods I saw on the slab. I noticed that many of them also had steel plates on their tops, with the same threaded rods... it looks like some of them can be stacked on top of each other, like those compact washer/dryer combos. The driver comes around the front of the truck to meet me and says, "Wadda ya want?". Caught off-guard, I said, "What do I need?". He says, "Whatever you want", which is not helpful at all. I said, "Well, what do most other people do?" He says, "They look at me all confused, like you are now". Boldly, I respond, "Well I want "Best Practices"!". He chuckles and says, "You realize that "Best Practices" is a made-up, bullshit term right?, "Best Practices" is whatever works for you". Then he says, "I'll tell you what, I'll leave the rig here for a couple of days so you can decide". I said, "Wait a minute, how am I gonna get any of those things in there to try, I don't see a crane or anything, and some of these look super heavy". He says, "No crane required... look", and he points to a button on the side of one these things that says "Install". He pushes it and the thing, whatever it was, vanishes off the truck bed. Startled, I said, "Where did that go?". He points over to the slab, on the left side of the wall, and I can see the "thing" sitting on the floor. Wow... that was cool. He says, "If you don't like it, there's another button on it that says "Remove", which will put it back on the trailer". With that, he turned and started walking down the street and says over his shoulder, "I'll be back in a two days". Hmm...there are a lot of things on this truck and I have no idea what any of them are. Walking around it I can see labels on them, "PowerApps", "Dynamics 365 Enterprise Sales", "Dynamics 365 Business Central", "Flow", "Power BI", and many more. I recognize Power BI, from the big pipe through the wall I pushed my head through earlier, so I push the install button on the side of it, and of course it... vanishes. I look over but I don't see it on the floor. Peering around the end of the wall, I see it now, attached to the wall like a crab, up towards the top on the left side. There are a bunch of wires dangling from it that are not connected to anything. I walk around to the other side of the wall, and I see a huge bundle of wires coming out of that pipe, streaming across the floor, running into all the other floor pipes. It does not seem to be doing anything, there is a panel of lights on the side of it, but none are lit. The right slab almost looks translucent, like I can see right into it... but I don't see anything. It's like standing in a boat, looking down into a clear lake... but there are no fish... no... anything. Well this is stupid, and useless, I push the remove button and all of the wires snake back out of the pipes, like a kid slurping in a piece of spaghetti, and they all go back through the wall and then the Power BI box vanishes. I look over my shoulder and see it re-appear on the truck bed. I wonder if there is a particular order that needs to be followed. I pull out the home-builder's guide-book, and can't make any sense of it, too many acronyms, obviously written for an experienced home-builder. I take a closer look at the PowerApps appliance on the truck bed. I see the Install and Remove buttons, but this thing has another button, "Reorder". What the hell does that do? I push it. Suddenly it lurches upward, flies over and lands on top of the Enterprise Sales Application thing. Interesting. I notice that the Enterprise Sales App thing has a similar "Reorder" button, so I push that. It does not seem like anything is happening, until I look up and notice that the PowerApps thing has lifted up from the top of the Enterprise Sales App thing. As soon as it clears the rods, the Enterprise Sales App thing lurches to the right, about its whole width distance, leaving the PowerApps thing floating in mid-air. It starts to descend slowly, and I notice that the Enterprise Sales App thing starts to rise up a the same cadence. The PowerApps things lands softly on the truck bed, and once the Enterprise Sales App thing clears its top, it starts to move to the left, over the PowerApps thing, and eventually settles on to the rods on the top of it. So it seems that these things can be stacked on top on one another in either order. I wonder why I would care? I am feeling brave now, so I push the Install button on the Enterprise Sales App and it vanishes, and reappears over on the foundation. I go ahead and do the same for the PowerApps thing, and it appears on the slab near the Enterprise Sales App thing. I walk over to the slab to see what these things are all about. They are both large... room-sized in fact, and like a room, they each have a door on their side. I crack open the door on the PowerApps thing and peer through. Whoa, that was scary, I slammed the door. It looked like an entire Home Depot store inside of this room, but how is that possible? I crack the door again and I can see the interior of this room is like 30,000 square feet, but from the outside, it looks to be a cube about 12' on each side. I close the door again, and start pacing around this cube. This is simply not possible... its like some David Copperfield illusion. I decide it must be an illusion, so when I come around to the side with the door, I swing it open and just walk right in. I gulp. I am literally standing inside the entrance of a huge Home Depot store. Rows and rows of everything I would need to build whatever the hell I wanted. Getting over the fact that there is a 30,000 sq ft store inside of this 12' cube, I think to myself, "Well this is handy". I turn around and exit the store, er, cube. As I exit the PowerApps cube, I am facing directly at the Enterprise Sales cube, which looks to be the same 12' on each side. Feeling braver now, knowing that I was able to exit the other cube successfully, I confidently move forward to open the door, I wonder what will be behind it, maybe a Lowes Store? I go ahead and enter. Well... this is different. The space is not as large as the PowerApps Home Depot, I am guessing about 10,000 sq ft, but this is a finished Mansion... and it's fully furnished. Still, it fit in a 12' cube, so that's amazing, but hard to top an entire Home Depot. Looking around I think, Wow, I can probably stop right here, and just live in this cube. Beautiful hardwood floors, a grand staircase to I don't know where, a black lacquered Grand Piano by the front window, and I'm still in the foyer. Wait.. I didn't see any windows from the outside of the cube! But never-mind, this is really beautiful, and huge! I stroll down a wide hallway with many openings on each side, and I come to one that has a plaque above it that says "Leads". Walking past, I can see luxurious seating fills the room, it looks like a waiting room for meeting a King. But there is no one in there. I see more openings for Opportunities, Contacts, Accounts, etc., but as I am walking I am starting to think that the style is not exactly me. Everything is Gold-Leafed, and the Crown Moldings are exquisite, but this would take my own "touches" to make it really what I would want. I head back and exit through the door. I am thinking that beautiful mansion would be great, if I could just fiddle with it, maybe move some walls around, or at least paint it in colors I like, and it hits me.... I have a Home Depot Right here. I walk over to the PowerApps cube and push the re-order button. It jolts upward and flies over the top of the Enterprise Sales App cube and settles smoothly on top of it. A roughly 4' square platform slides out from under the door on the upper cube. A ladder, that I had not noticed before starts to extend from under the platform. It is going straight out horizontally, then stops after about 12'. Just as I am wondering how I will reach it, it starts to pivot downward, and the bottom of it touches the slab right in front of me. I decide I will check it out, but as soon as my hand touches the rung in front of me, I am standing on the platform facing the door, 12' above... my stomach feels a jolt, like you get from a trampoline. Okay, that was freaky, but I notice that while still confused, I'm not scared anymore. I walk through the door into the now familiar Home Depot, but see immediately that the floor is transparent. I can see the whole interior of the Enterprise Sales cube below. Actually, I can't even see the floor, but it must be there as I am obviously standing on something. I reach down to touch it, and my hand goes straight through. How is this possible? At this point, I decide to stop asking myself How, and just roll with it. As a test, I walk over to the paint department and grab a gallon of Deep Blue, which is my favorite color. I walk across the clear floor to over top of the Leads room I saw before. Now what? Maybe that is not how it works. I put the can down to think, and a second later it starts to wiggle and then poof, it disappears through the clear floor, and I can see the entire Leads room is now painted Deep Blue. Okay, that is pretty damn cool. I think I am figuring out how this works now, using everything at my disposal in the Home Depot, I can remodel whatever I want in the Enterprise Sales App Manson to fit my tastes. This is going to be fun. I decide to head back out to the truck and see what else is there. I go back out the door on the platform and instead of taking the ladder I decide to just jump the 12'. But as soon as my feet leave the platform, the slab actually shoots upward... I only traveled like an inch. I look forward, expecting to see myself 12' above the street, but I am at street level, and I have that odd feeling in my stomach again. Back at the trailer, I go ahead and climb up on the bed and start perusing the items. I now know that some of these, once installed will become 12' cubes, even though none of them are more than 4' here. At the front of the bed I see some crates, so I meander though the cubes to reach them. The first crate has "Flows" printed on the side of it. The lid is hinged, but not nailed shut, so I lift the top open. Inside are what appear to be small hand weights, so I reach down to pick one up. As soon as my hand encircles the grip, some metallic claws shoot out from either end of it. It's a good thing I did not have my face down there, I could have lost an eye. The claws seemed to be reaching for something that was not there, just snapping wildly. I loosened my grip and let it fall back on top of the others. I am not sure what the hell I do with those. Next to the Flows crate is a plastic 55 gallon drum with a sticker on top of it that reads, "Steve's Data". They had my name! I'm actually a little annoyed, but I decide to check it out. After loosening the cinch holding down the lid, I grabbed the lid on each side and quickly lifted it straight up. I was half expecting one of these spring snakes to pop out like one of those toys with the fake soup can. But, it was nothing dramatic, in fact it seemed to just be a barrel of water. l started to move on, but heard small noises coming from it. I gripped the two sides of the rim, bent a little and peered down into the water.. listening. I could faintly hear what sounded like thousands of conversations, all going on at once. Yes, there was definitely something in there. I put my hand on the top of the water and swished it back and forth. As I did, a face shot up to within an inch of the top of the water, and scared the shit out of me. But I kept looking and noticed there were a bunch of faces rising into view and then slowly fading as they descended back down. I am scared again, this seems really creepy. I take two steps back away from the drum, backing into something else that is just below the height of my butt, so I sit on it... thinking. The drum is sitting on a small raised platform with a button on it. Bending over I can read that is says "Migrate". I am not touching that... at least not from this position. I jump off the truck bed and scan the dirt yard and see a stick. I grab it, and inch my way down the left side of the trailer bed, peering around the corner at the barrel. I carefully reach in with the stick and push the Migrate button, and duck. I am leaning against the trailer, just out of view of the barrel, and I can feel a vibration in my shoulder where it meets the trailer. Suddenly, whoosh, I look up and see water flying straight up, then arching over towards my house. As it starts to descend, it's spray widens like a garden hose nozzle, and it seems like way more than 55 gallons. It comes down all over the slab, on both sides of the wall, but does not make a splash or any puddles. It just disappears into the slab, on both sides of the wall. It all happened in literally 10 seconds. I'm panting, but decide to get a grip, and go see what happened. Walking back up to the slab, on the left side of the house, I stop short of stepping onto it, I immediately notice that it looks different. It appears transparent... not as transparent as the slab on the other side of the wall, but I had not noticed it before. It's like one of these geometric pictures that if you stare at long enough, and trick your eyes into a different focus you suddenly see a ship or something. Staring at the slab, I started to pick out those faces again, just under the surface. But they weren't swimming around like they were in the barrel, they were now fixed into neat rows. But there was odd movement. I stuck my head out over the slab to look straight down at one, and saw it appear to shoot way somewhere, but it was still there. Most were not moving at all, but some appeared to be talking... to whom, I have no idea. Taking a closer look at the next one I realized that I knew this person, which caused me to take a step back. Then I tripped on something and fell flat on my face in the dirt. Ouch, I think I landed on a stick. I turned my head towards the slab and was looking the edge of it. Still transparent, something looked different from this angle. The faces looked like they were made up of a bunch of layers... thin slices stacked on top of each other with a tiny space in between them. I lifted my head a little higher to get an oblique angle, and could see that the bottom face layer seemed fixed, but the face layers above it were all talking and shooting off in different directions, and also coming in to the layer stack from other places I could not see. The entire slab seemed like it was alive! But the faces did not seem to notice me. I stood up and dusted myself off and thought "this is the weirdest house I've ever seen". I stepped onto the slab. It took me a bit to get my balance walking on a slab with all these faces shooting around under my feet. Even though the slab was not moving, it felt like it was. But once my brain locked into that, I was able to walk around. I noticed that a lot of these talking faces where heading in a similar direction. I followed the path over and found myself watching a bunch of them coming in and out of the pipe to the Productivity Applications neighborhood. It was like watching ants, with as many going into the pipe as were coming out of it. All shooting in different directions when they arrived. This slab was more than just alive, it seemed to be umbilically connected to the other neighborhood. I stood there for about 5 minutes, mesmerized by all the talking faces, shooting around under the floor, and I decided to explore. I walked over to the big pipe in the wall that said Power BI and stuck my head through again. Looking down, I could see on the now completely transparent floor all of the faces, but no movement. I thought, that's odd, over here they're zinging around, and over there they are all static. Oh well, I guess it will make sense later, and as I withdrew my head and turned around I was facing the Enterprise Sales Cube again. I hesitated, and then thought, what the hell, and opened the door. The beautiful mansion, that was so quiet before, was now a buzz of conversations, it sounded like there was a cocktail party going on down the hall... in my house. I started to make my way back to that wide hallway. Looking up, I could see that the ceiling was now clear and I was walking under the Home Depot store. I was in the main foyer of the mansion, but I was also under the paint department above. Just for kicks, I put a chair on top of the grand piano and climbed up on the piano, and then the chair. I reached up and could put my hand right through the clear ceiling. But I could not quite reach the first shelf in the Home Depot above. I climbed back down and noticed a ladder in the corner of the room. I know this was not here before... maybe it showed up when put the PowerApps cube on top. I pulled it over next to the grand piano and climbed up. Now I could easily reach the first shelf and grabbed a can of paint and pulled it down. It got stuck coming through the clear floor and I had to tug on it, then suddenly, it broke free and disappeared. Ugh. I started to loose my balance on the ladder so I looked to grab the top and steady myself and I noticed that the entire foyer was now painted in a shit brown color. So it worked, but clearly I need to pay closer attention, or I could make this mansion into a mess. I hopped off the ladder and continued my walk towards the wide hallway. As I got closer to the hallway, the voices were getting louder. As I reached the end of the hallway, I stopped as I could now clearly make out many of the conversations. Somebody was talking about their sales process, blah, blah. Someone else, farther down the hall, was complaining about something, and from the first opening, the one I peered into before that said Leads, I could hear lots of conversations going on. I crept along the wall so as not to be noticed, and peeked around the edge of the opening. There was a cacophony of conversations going on, I could not actually understand any of them since everybody seemed to be talking about different things all at once. Looking into the room, I saw hundreds of floating, two-dimensional faces.. all talking. I wondered for a minute what the purpose of the nice chairs was, since these faces were all floating about 5 or so feet above the floor. I tried to focus on one of the conversations, I was able to pick out a familiar voice, and concentrated on it. Some guy was asking about licensing costs, and I realized, this is a conversation that I had a week ago with Riley Thomas, and that was Riley Thomas talking, as I turned my eyes to where it seemed to be coming from, there was Riley's face floating in the air. I shifted my focus to others, in turn, and realized, these were all conversations that I had had! Some from years ago, and others from as recently as yesterday! As I was digesting this I noticed one of the faces starting to head towards me, then it accelerated so fast I could not even duck. The floating face hit my face and exploded in to a cloud of smoke that kept going, I didn't feel anything, but I swung around to see where it was going and saw it re-assemble itself into a face and shoot into another room. The plaque over that room said "Contacts". I stepped across the hall and peeked into the Contacts room to see where the face had gone. This room was also full of floating, jabbering faces, but I knew them all. The room was full of faces that I was currently working with in my job. Looking back down the hallway, I saw the other openings and heard more conversations going on, but decided I need to take a break and absorb this, so I headed back out of the Mansion, er, cube. I stepped off the slab on the left side, and looked over at the slab on the right side of the wall. The faces were all still there, but still were not moving. I walked back to the trailer. Scanning the items on the truck bed, my gaze landed back on the Power BI thing again. I thought, "I wonder if it would actually do anything now?". I pushed the Install button, and like before it vanished. At least this time I knew where it went. I walked back to the slab, and sure enough around the corner up on the wall like a crab, there it was. Like before, all of the wires on the other side of the wall had slithered out and gone into all of the pipes, but unlike the last time, now on this side of the wall, the wires that were previously just dangling, had leapt out and connected to the Enterprise Sales App Cube. I also noticed a bunch of them had shot down the Productivity Applications Neighborhood pipe. Looking down at the floor, it seemed to be about the same amount of busy movement. I could not put my head through the Power BI pipe anymore since the now fully lit up Power BI thing was crabbed over it, so I walked around the end of the wall to the other side. The previously static faces were now all moving, but in completely different patterns than on the left side of the wall. Something different was happening, but I could not tell what it was exactly. On the left side everything looked the same, but clearly something was different, I was just not seeing it. I decided to take another peek inside the Enterprise Sales App Mansion. The walls of the foyer, that I had previously painted shit brown, now looked like the Sports Book at a casino, lined with monitors all the way around. But instead of showing some horse race, they were all displaying charts and graphs. I walked up to one that a small sign under it that read, "Lead Generation Rate", it was showing a bar graph by month of new leads. I assumed this was linked to that Leads room down the hall. Every kind of "metric" you could think of was displayed on all of these monitors in the foyer, and they were all constantly changing, in real-time. I was starting to get dizzy, and decided to get some air. As I was walking back out towards the truck on the street, I saw the driver walking back. I assumed he must have forgotten something in his truck, like his phone or something. He walked right up to me and said, "Are you done?" I said, "Hell no, you only left an hour ago!". He said, "Nope, it was two days ago like I said". I said  "That's impossible", and he said, "It happens a lot, people start messing with this stuff and time flies by". I knew it was only an hour, but he seemed convinced, and he was wearing different clothes. I said, "Well, if you have to go, can I just install everything, and then figure it all out later?" He smiled and said, "Let me show you something", and he walked over to the trailer motioning for me to follow. "Do you see that?" he said, pointing to the corner of another thing with a label called "Field Service" on it, I said "Yeah, Field Service, whatever that is". He said " No, I mean there in the top corner". I looked and saw a price tag that said "$95/user/month", I looked at the other things and now noticed that they all had price tags. Shit! He said "Are you sure you want to install all of it?" I said, "No... damn... I need time to figure this out". He said, "I got you covered" and disappeared around the front of the truck. A moment later I heard the truck engine start and thought, this asshole is leaving. The rig started backing up, and continued for about 100', then stopped. A second later it started to move forward again and I thought he must be feeling sorry for me, but instead the truck started to veer towards me. I moved out of the way, and he drove right across my future lawn and stopped. I heard the door open, and then some hissing sounds. I saw the front of the trailer lift up a bit and stop. Then the truck started to move forward again, but no longer connected to the trailer. He went down the street and turned around, and stopped on his way back by. He leaned out of the cab and said "I'll just leave this here for you, for as long as you want, just don't forget those price tags", then he waved and drove off. I sat on the slab, aware that my butt was covering at least one person's face, and looked at the trailer sitting in my front yard. After a few minutes, I thought, what the hell, and walked back over to it. I saw another crate labeled "Insights", next to the "Flows" crate. I climbed up to take a look at what was in this one. I lifted the lid, and saw what looked just like the flows... little barbells. I reached in and grabbed one, and of course the claws came out of each end. I turned my wrist over and saw printed on the side, "Sales Insights". Looking down in the crate, it seemed like an awful lot of "Insights" were in there. I felt something, and opening my palm slightly I noticed there was an Install button on the grip. I pushed it. The barbell flew out of my hand and started heading towards the house. It flew right into one of the smaller pipes in the wall, and I saw a claw extend from the end of it to the Enterprise Sales App cube, and connect to something I had not noticed before. The claw on the other end shot down some hole in the slab on the right side. So now, I guess I have to check this out. I went ahead and grabbed a handful of Flows and put them in my pocket. Then I headed back toward the slab, into the Mansion, and again made my way down to the Leads room and looked in. The faces were all there like before, but there was something new. In addition to the two-dimensional face, there was now a three dimensional box floating above each of the faces. I ventured in to take a closer look. It did not seem that any of these faces were aware of my physical presence, which was reassuring. In fact, I walked right up to a face I recognized, that was blathering away... a conversation I had last month. I looked up at the box, above the floating head and saw there were words on each side of it. I stepped back slightly so I could read it, it said "Chances of Qualification: 33%". I leaned to the left, and read on the side of the box, "You have not made contact with this Lead in 2 months". There were more words on the other sides of the box, but I think I got what was going on here. I decided instead to figure out what these "Flows" did. I headed back out of the cube and onto the slab and walked to the edge, looking at the duplex next store that was already built. Man it was nice. Lots of great additions, a perfect yard, and listening closely I could hear that it was quietly "humming". As I was about to turn, the neighbor's front door opened, and a guy came walking out with a cat on a leash. He spotted me and waved, and then tripped on a bush and landed flat on his face. I thought, what a dumbass, who walks a cat on a leash? It occurred to me, that if that dumbass could build such an awesome house, I will certainly be able to figure all this out. I smiled and waved back as he was standing back up, his cat was looking at him, probably also thinking he was a dumbass. I saw his garage door opening. He stepped into it, and there was some chatter I could not make out, and then a pickup truck slowly pulled out of it, my neighbor was waving goodbye to the driver. I saw the sign on the door of the truck said, "PartnerCo Construction", and I realized then how that dumbass was able to build such an awesome house. I really hope I won't need help too. I pulled one of the Flows out of my pocket, and gripped it so the claws would come out. As I was looking at it, I felt a tug downward, that got stronger. So strong in fact that my arm was being pulled down. A claw shot out and clamped onto the Dropbox connector, I had forgotten that they lined the edge of the slab. It sat there, motionless now, in my palm. I checked, and like the Insights, there was an Install button so I pushed it. The other claw shot out the other end and started flailing wildly. I thought it was heading towards the Enterprise Sales App cube, but then it veered off and started towards the Productivity Applications Neighborhood pipe, but skipped right past that and started hovering over all of the other connector pipes in turn, for about a second apiece. It did not grab onto anything, it just repeated this cycle. I started to walk and noticed the cable from the grip to the claw on the DropBox connector let out slack as I walked, the other end continuing to flail about, but as I walked, I noticed it started to check fewer points, seemingly understanding where I was heading. When I got to within about 3' of the Enterprise Sales App cube, the claw flew past my head and latched onto it, and I felt a pulsing in my palm which startled me and caused me to let go of it. The handle just hovered in the air, suspended by the claws and the cables tightened from each end of it. It was as tight as a guitar string. I guess I need to head back into the Mansion to see what this thing did. Looking back into the Leads room, I saw the now-familiar floating faces, with the floating boxes over them, and something new. A filing cabinet was now floating over each box, on the side it said "DropBox Files". Simple enough, I guess I know what these flows do now. I'm exhausted. It still feels like it's only been a few hours, but in this world, if that trucker was correct, it could have been a week. I head back out to the trailer. I think to myself, man there are a lot of things on this trailer, as I scan my eyes across the deck. I walk up and notice a little gold plaque on one of these things, engraved in fancy script was, "Packed with Pride by J. Phillips"... that's a nice touch. I lay down on a small hill of dirt under the trailer, in the shade, and look back at my house. My brain is racing. The trailer bed above my head is still so full of things, I have not even scratched the surface yet. My eyelids clamp shut... I'm so tired.. I try, but I can't even open them, I give up. I am thinking about all of the things I can do with this hou.... zzzzzzzzzzz.    

Dynamics 365 Customers and Partners have had a few changes pushed to them in recent years. Dynamics 365 was evolving at a pretty rapid pace since it hit the cloud, and when James Phillips took over the team, he took both of his feet and smashed the gas pedal. It's like the USS Enterprise when it hits Warp Drive (I get a chill every time I see that). Trees in the Forest I have been seeing a lot of posts about the October Release Notes and the #freighttrain of new features coming. Everybody seems to be writing about their favorite new feature(s). Don't get me wrong, new features are always fun, but if you move out of the trees, and look at the whole forest, there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Seismic Shift I get that "Seismic Shift" is probably an overused term... but I think it is a very real thing that is happening in Microsoft Business Applications... right now! If you have followed this blog in the past, you know that when I get highly animated about something, you probably want to pay attention to it. I said in the title that CDS changes everything you know. But at the same time you have been hearing that, if you know XrM, you already know CDS, and that is completely true. But that is looking at CDS through a specific narrow lens, a legacy Dynamics lens. But if you circle around to the other side of CDS, you can clearly see that Dynamics 365 is really just one door to CDS, of many doors. A PowerApps Stamp I was talking to Charles Lamanna recently, the GM for the CDS Platform; I suggested that he had a PowerApps rubber stamp, and that he was stamping "PowerApps" onto everything in sight. He smiled... like a guy with a rubber stamp in his pocket. PowerApps is one leg, of a three-legged stool, known as the "Power Platform", the other legs being Power BI and Flow. Dynamics 365 is not mentioned as a component of the Power Platform. I think in the very near future, the term "Dynamics 365" will actually refer to the First-Party Apps, and those apps will be sharing the spotlight with applications built by others on the Power Platform. The Power Platform I know I have mentioned it before, but it was not that long ago that I was told unequivocally, that Microsoft will never release a platform-only license. In order to get CDS, you will need to license one of their first-party apps. In hindsight, I think I recall hearing this from a GM for one of the first-party app teams. Whether he was unaware, or the decision to release a platform-only license, was made afterwards, I don't know. But somebody decided to take a risk and release a platform-only license. What risk? The risk that smart folks might actually build better "apps" than Microsoft, on Microsoft's own platform. Risky Business A quote from this 1983 movie was "Sometimes you just gotta say, "WTF". "WTF" gives you freedom". Somebody at Microsoft said "WTF", let them have the platform. At the end of the day, cloud is about scale, whoever has the most recurring revenue wins. If all of Wall Street could only place their bets on one number, it would be growth of recurring revenue. Wall Street does not give a shit about how you get there. Up until now, in the Microsoft Business Applications space, their recurring revenue growth doorway, was tied exclusively to their sale of their first-party applications. Well, they just broke down the doorway... hell the whole wall has come down. Let's do some Math Let's say you are a mid-sized Real Estate firm looking for a business solution to improve your sales process for your 500 agents. In your web search you discover this link to Dynamics 365, and click to explore it. Obviously, not wanting to waste your time, you will go to the pricing page first, and see the Customer Engagement Plan at $115/Per user/month. Hmm, that's about $57,500/month (we, as partners, know that is a worst case cost scenario, but the visitor does not). For almost $60K a month, this application must be awesome! So the customer initiates a trial. In their poking around, they are duly impressed with all of the cool features and capabilities, but... where is the Real Estate angle? "RING" There goes the phone, who could that be? "Hello Mr Real Estate CEO, I'm your friendly Dynamics 365 Partner and I see you are interested in Dynamics 365". "Well yes, but where are the features for Real Estate?". "What do you need? We can build anything for you, Dynamics 365 is fully extensible". "Well, I would need blah, blah and some blah to make this work". "No problem, we can build that for you for $100K". "Thanks, I'll get back to you". Back to the web search results, there's another link for the "Acme Real Estate Application". Taking a closer look, Acme is only $75/Per user/month. Hmmm, that's about $37,500/month... let's take a look at this. Wow! This application has been built for exactly what I need... it already has blah, blah and even blah! It says it is built on the Microsoft "Power Platform", whatever that is... I'm Sold! Looking at the difference in cost, you might think that Microsoft just lost $37,500/month ($115 Plan License, vs, $40 P2 license) to an ISV, but in reality, without that ISV solution, that customer was going to another platform. Net gain to Microsoft... $20K monthly recurring revenue. Microsoft has a half-dozen first-party apps that run on the CDS platform. Imagine 500 vertical ISV solutions running on the same platform. Microsoft will take that to the bank all day long. Transition of Power Up until now, Microsoft Business Applications success was largely tied to their Partner ecosystem of System Integrators. These are the partners that sell the first-party applications, and then configure and customize them for their customers. ISVs have been around for a long time, but mostly in the role of "Addons" offered by SIs. That wall that Microsoft knocked down, is about to change that. Already there are some ISVs, like us with our RapidStart CRM solution, that are trickling over the transom. That trickle will become a flood, and ISVs will become Microsoft's most valuable partners, in the very near future. According to Mr. Spock, “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”.  

There are a lot of opinions floating around the Dynamics 365 channel today. Talk to any partner and they will say things like "If it were up to me, I would do this or that... but don't tell anybody I said that". Seems to me, if we don't tell anybody what we think, we should not be entitled to complain about any results! "Microsoft wouldn't listen to me" This is the most common response I get, when I suggest to someone that they should share their opinions with Microsoft. Whispering to each other in the corners is not going to accomplish anything. If you have built a practice that is dependent on Microsoft, you have an obligation to yourself and your company to make yourself heard; and I have found that Microsoft is not just willing to listen, but is usually eager to hear! That does not mean that they will act on your particular suggestion, but as a Partner Led company, partner opinions are core to everything they need to accomplish. If they built some thing that no partner liked or agreed with, then no partner would sell it! In fact, Microsoft has significant motions in place to get this exact kind of Feedback, from the MVP Communities to Partner Advisory Councils, and more, including the Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. Pilot for a Day You know those flight simulators that they train pilots in, so Microsoft has a secret one, 24 levels below a non-descript building on campus. What if James Phillips were to say to you, "Okay smart guy, you take a turn in our "D365 Strategy Simulator". Umm... it is one thing to voice an opinion about some particular aspect that impacts your particular footprint, we could all do that pretty easily. But that is only navigating for your practice, at the end of the day, even if a course could be plotted that satisfied every partners' viewport, it would crash and burn. While Microsoft may be Partner-Led, partners are not the customers. So, let's try that again, but this time, don't solve for partners, solve for customers. The Invite So I get this email from Phillips, "Steve, we have identified you as an opinionated know-it-all, and wanted to invite you and some other opinionated know-it-alls, to spend a day in our Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. Be on campus this Friday at 5AM at bus stop #12452". So I arrive at exactly 5AM and there are already several other partners, that we all know very well. We all get on the bus, and the blindfolding process seems to take longer than it should, but we are eventually underway. After about 30 minutes the bus stops, and I can hear a big garage door closing. We are all led, still blindfolded, down a corridor and guided into an elevator, as the door closes, we are told we can remove our blindfolds. The elevator has only one button, and Phillips pushes it and we start to go down. The ride takes a full 3 minutes, but stops smoothly and the door opens to a cavernous room. In the middle of the room is a large capsule, with a door on the back of it, sitting on a bunch of metal arms and levers. I snuck a photo of it when Phillip's back was turned. Pre-Flight We are ushered into a small auditorium, and sent down two rows to sit, I am in the back row. The first problem is that I am sitting right behind James Crowter, and he's pretty tall so I have to crane my neck to see. I look to my right to see who is talking, when we are supposed be be quiet, of course... Joel Lindstrom. Anyway, on the stage stands Phillips, and right behind him from left to right are Marko, Param and some AX guy I don't know. Above their heads are three large monitors, side by side. Each monitor is displaying various data about a particular platform like pricing, structure, licensing, functionality, etc. From left to right the monitors are NAV, CRM and AX. As Phillips opens his mouth to speak, George Doubinski jumps up from his seat and says "I am the only real developer here... just saying" and sits back down. Phillips looks at him for a few seconds, and then continues, "Behind me you will see an overview of the items that you will be able to control in the simulator. Each of you will have full control over every aspect of these items". I hear Mark Smith say, just loud enough for everyone to hear: "Brilliant!". Then I notice that Marko is kind of tipping his head, and darting his eyes up, motioning towards the NAV monitor. Phillips catches this out of the corner of his eye, and turns to Marko, who smiles sheepishly and stops. Param rolls his eyes, but the AX guy didn't notice. I also see Alysa Taylor, over by the door, whispering to some guy I have not met before, his name tag says, "Hi, I'm Hayden". We will be taken, one at a time from here to the simulator, and Crowter goes first. He stands and passes Sarah Critchley, who I can see is laser focused on her phone, I lean forward to see what is so important, at a time like this, and see she is editing a new cat emoji. The Simulator About an hour passes, and Crowter re-enters the auditorium. I can't tell from his face, whether he passed or failed, and he is not letting on. Before I get a chance to lean in and ask him how it went, my name is called. "Right Now Mordue!" Ugh. Phillips leads me into the main room, and the door is opened on the back of the capsule, and a staircase unfolds. He motions for me to enter, apparently I was climbing the stairs too slowly, because he kinda pushed me over the last one, and then slammed the door shut. It is quite dark, just a red glow, enough where I can make out shapes. There's a chair in front of me that looks like Captain Kirk's Star Trek chair, and I circle around and sit in it. As I sit, a metal seat-belt comes out of the left side and crosses my stomach and clicks into the right side. I look at the armrests, and it looks like almost all of the padding has been scratched off, and even the metal underneath has what looks like claw marks. Suddenly, I am awash in bright light as three monitors fire to life, in the same orientation as the auditorium. Below each monitor are switches, levers and dials to adjust what is on them. Below the middle monitor is a small LED that says "Mission One: Solve for Enterprise". It flashes a few times and then says "Begin", I feel a slight jolt as the simulator comes to life. Mission One Hmm, Solve for Enterprise... not my area of expertise, but I'll take a shot, because it doesn't look like I can skip it. First, I reach to the left, under the NAV monitor. I am remembering Marko saying that NAV can be used for SMB, all the way up to Enterprise, but most of the NAV partners I know, are not focused on Enterprise. I don't know AX that well either, but understand it to be a more complex product aimed at enterprise. So I turn off all of the NAV capabilities, and on the right, I crank up all of the AX levers. In the middle, where the CRM label has been crossed through with a sharpie, and Customer Engagement has been hand written below, I also start turning up levers. Field Service: On, Project Service: On, anything marked "Insights": On. A new monitor lights up below, that I had not noticed before, it is not very tall, but it spans across and under all three of the big monitors, and flashes CDS before showing a whole bunch of other dials, and I see a new set of levers below it. I flip them all on. I sit for minute... thinking... looking at the glowing green button on the right armrest labeled "Start Simulation"... I press it. I hear laughing erupt outside of the capsule, apparently the crew has seen this configuration before, I fear that I won't do well, but hey, this is not my area of expertise. I have no doubt that Joel will crush my score on this one. The capsule rocks around for a bit and then stops, all monitors go dark, the LED says "Simulation Completed". It did not say "Mission Accomplished", so I have no idea what happened, but before I can even think further about it, the LED flashes, "Mission Two : Solve for SMB". Mission Two Now we're talking, SMB is my wheelhouse. The three big monitors light up again, the same as they started in the first simulation. The first thing I do, is turn everything on the right (AX) side off. When Microsoft says SMB, I assume they are really meaning upper small to middle sized companies, as nobody makes any money on the 5 seat deals, so that is the lens I am thinking about. I look at CRM, ugh, I mean Customer Engagement next, as that is what I know. First thing, turn off Field Service and Project Service. My goal is to solve for the meat of the SMB market, not the fringes, so I go ahead and turn off Customer Service for now also. This is going to focus on Sales, the door that 90% of SMBs enter from. Insights? Too complex for most SMBs, at least to start, so I push those levers down, but not all the way. Appsource? Yes, yes, that one goes full to the top, SMB would rather buy than build any day. Plus, some of the enterprise features I turned off, will be filled by SMB focused products from Appsource. As I make adjustments, new windows appear, based on the selections I have made, a new one pops up in the corner now, it is labeled Business Edition in a crossed through font with a question mark next to it. I know that regardless of that they end up calling it, this is the simplified UI, so I push all of those levers to the top. A box flashes at the bottom of the window, "Do you want to change the default price of $40/user?", I check "No". I lean back, feeling pretty good about this configuration, I let me head loll to the left, and I am facing the NAV monitor. Hmm, NAV, I am not an NAV partner, but something is telling me that is is important for this simulation. I look down to the LED and it is flashing: "Create a branch of this simulation?" I think about this. Many customers that I have encountered in the SMB space have been looking for just a sales solution. Is that because they are not interested in an end-to-end solution, or because I do not know enough to offer one? If I did, and I offered it, wouldn't that give me an even stronger competitive advantage? I decide to create a branch of what I started and find out. I look at the NAV monitor... it does not say Tenerife yet, but that just came out and the guy with the Sharpie hasn't got to it yet. I see a lot of items on the screen that I do not understand, and the levers look foreign also, but I do recognize a few. One says SaaS on the top and on-premise on the bottom. I place it to about 80% SaaS, because I know there will still be some customers who are ignorant to the cloud. I tweak a few other levers that I really don't understand, but I need to move them somewhere, as I am sure the defaults are not what I want. I notice another lever that says "re-factor platform?" Looking down at the LED, I see that I can create yet another branch of the simulation from here. I press it. When I select "re-factor platform" for my new branch, I notice some new grab handles on the windows. I had just talked to Crowter the other day, and he floated an idea by me as a CRM guy, for my opinion. Hoping he did not notice the "Create a Branch" option, I am going to steal it and see if can beat him in this simulation with his own idea... I'm not proud. I take the grab handle at the top of the NAV screen, and drag the entire screen over to the middle one, and drop it on top of the XRM box. What if NAV were actually a CRM App built on XRM? That would take care of any integration challenges. I know we have CDS, but would this not be easier. One UI, a platform within a platform instead of next to it... I'm liking this idea, thanks Crowter, ya sucker. A box appears, "Do you want to change the default price of "TBD?" Hmm, this is a good question. Knowing that in the App model, different users could use different things, and I already accepted the $40 price for Sales only, I decide that for this NAV App a good price would be $75/user. It does not give me an option to create a price for Sales and NAV, but that may not come up that often anyway. I press the button on the armrest to start all simulations. The capsule rocks back and forth for what seems like a long time, and then everything goes dark again, just the red glow. Nothing is happening. The seat belt slides back open, so I assume I'm done. I stand and turn towards the door and it opens, I squint from the light and I see Phillips waving me out. He leads me back to the auditorium, and as I enter I hear, "Right Now Lindstom!" Post Flight As my eyes adjust, I notice Crowter sitting in front of me. I lean in and say "James, did you see the branching option?", and he says "what branching option?". I lean back and smile. Several hours pass, and finally everyone has returned to the auditorium. The last one to return is Chris Cognetta, he is backing into the room, still turned towards the simulator, I think he is explaining to the simulator crew how simulators work. It's quiet now, but I can hear George grumbling about a lever in the simulator that was sticking, and obviously not well designed. Marko, Param and the AX guy are nowhere to be seen. Alysa is still whispering to "Hi, I'm Hayden", and pointing at some of us, although I can't tell who. Phillips clears his throat, and says "Thank you for your participation, the crew will re-blindfold you and return you to the bus stop". Before I can stop myself, I blurt out "Wait!! Who won?", Phillips shoots me a glance, pauses, and says, "Hopefully, we all did". Next steps for you As you can clearly see, Microsoft is extremely willing to take feedback from partners. The next time you see Phillips, Marko, Param, Alysa, "Hi I'm Hayden", or the AX guy. Tell them you want to crack at the Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. They will probably deny its existence, and I will probably get some serious heat from them for exposing it. But don't take no for an answer.

It was less than a year ago... I was asking Dynamics 365 leaders about the possibility of Dynamics 365 being offered as a "Naked" platform. The strategy, that has been successfully employed by Salesforce.com for years, did not seem like it was on Microsoft's radar. I was told "Never gonna happen". Fast-Forward to a month ago... It happened. Seems Like Yesterday It wouldn't be a post by me, if I didn't first take you down some long-winded path of how we got here, before I get into "here"... and this is a post by me. So we're going to go back in time, to the day before "Dynamics 365" became a brand. The product I am referring to was called Dynamics CRM Online. This was Microsoft's answer to Salesforce.com, a CRM that was Cloud from day one. I won't go all the way back to 2011, when Microsoft clumsily stepped into the ring with Salesforce. Those early bouts were too painful to remember. But even though Dynamics kept getting knocked down, they kept getting back up. From first-round knockouts, Dynamics persevered... progressively making it to three rounds, then five, then eight, up to the occasional draw. For the ardent battle watchers, Salesforce.com is still winning, but their corner must be concerned about the trajectory of Dynamics. Just another acquisition Microsoft was on an acquisition tear a couple of years ago. In a seemingly desperate attempt to shore up their weaknesses against the reigning champion, Microsoft bought a bunch of crap to bolt-on to Dynamics. Since most of these have gone down the drain, how is it that Dynamics is closer now to knocking out Salesforce, than ever before? It is actually because of Field One. Huh? Field One was a third-party solution that provided field service capabilities for Dynamics CRM Online. Were these "capabilities" the secret weapon? Not even close. But there was something unique about the Field One acquisition that ultimately led to a huge light-bulb going off that changed everything. Nativisation I know, I made up another word, deal with it. In the Dynamics world, when it comes to third-party solutions, there is this idea of "Native". What it means is that the solution was built within Dynamics, using Dynamics as the platform. The former Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Parature and other acquisitions were not built on the Dynamics platform, Field One was. A better known example of a Native solution is ClickDimensions. The evidence is undeniable, Microsoft's success with Native solutions, versus trying to incorporate non-native solutions, is clear. In case I lost you, Native is better. I am sure Microsoft would love to have figured this out, before they had squandered so much capital on non-native options... but some things just have to be learned the hard way. They Know Now With the Field Service example, Microsoft dove into their own development capabilities to build Project Service.. kind of a fork of Field Service, as both share many resources. Coming some time later, but with the same native-built mindset, was Dynamics 365 for Marketing, but I am getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about the "pivot". Pivoting A "Pivot" in the software business is when you change directions. Sometimes you pivot because you are failing, other times you pivot because you see a better path than the one you were on. Dynamics has been a pivoting machine. This includes "re-pivoting", where you pivot back from a previous pivot, like the "Business Edition '" pivot(s)... but I digress. A major pivot that Microsoft made, was to rebrand all of their disparate Dynamics offerings under a new name "Dynamics 365". Sometimes one pivot, leads to other pivots. In this case, for Customer Engagement, in particular, it was the idea of separating apps. Separation Anxiety It starts with licensing. Dynamics 365 included Sales, Service and Marketing as a complete, single SaaS offering. This Field Service thing was a separate add-on solution, so It was priced separately, as was the Project Service offering. Seems like it makes sense to go ahead and separate the other workloads as well, so suddenly Sales and Service are licensed separately. Unfortunately, Sales and Service were not "separated", from either each other, or the underlying platform. No problem, a paper license will solve that! So, if you are keeping up, we now have separately priced workloads. We were hearing from Microsoft that Sales and Service would eventually be physically separated from each other, as well as the platform, but it was not clear at that time, how that would be accomplished. The CDS Pivot The CDS Pivot, among other things, provided the means for Microsoft to untangle Sales and Service from the platform. I am not sure at the time of this writing, where they are on the separation of Sales and Service from one another, but at least they got the twins out of the mother. And what is the mother? CDS (Common Data Service). CDS is the underlying "Naked" platform upon which Sales, Service, Field Service, Project Service and the new Dynamics 365 for Marketing are installed upon. These "apps" as we now call them, are the "First-party" apps, the ones that Microsoft owns. But wait a minute... did I say Naked? The Naked Platform Today, as a result of all of this pivoting, we now have a new option. We have the ability to provision the Dynamics 365 platform, without any first-party apps... a naked platform. Okay, it is not completely naked. It includes what is known as CRM Prime, think of that as some basic building blocks. Things like Accounts and Contacts as record types (entities), as well as functional things like Activities, etc. But no Sales specific things like Leads, Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, and Invoices for example. Almost naked. But it does include the XrM development "engine", meaning you can build whatever you want on top of those basic blocks. This platform is available under the name PowerApps, and in particular "Model-Driven" PowerApps. The license required to utilize it is called the PowerApps P2, and it costs $40/month/user. If you are thinking that this sounds a lot like that thing they said they would never do less than a year ago, you would be right. It's called a pivot. Who Cares As a customer, with Sales related needs for example, you might be wondering, what's the point? Obviously you need the robust Sales capabilities of the first-party Sales app, otherwise CDS is just a glorified Rolodex. That would be a fair read. In the large majority of cases, I see the first-party apps as being the appropriate starting point. Why on earth would you spend the money to have someone build all of that on the naked platform, if it already exists? It would not be to save money, that's for sure. The first-party apps are highly evolved, sophisticated solutions. It would not be economically viable to attempt to replicate them, to save a couple of bucks. But what if your needs are unique? I know, everybody thinks their needs are unique. From talking to thousands of customers over the years, I can tell you, what most of you think is unique, is just configuration. But occasionally, you will find that situation where the first-party app will require so many development level changes, that there is not much left of the first-party app. In many of these cases, I see where it would be more economically viable to "roll your own" on CDS. Protection Pivot So Microsoft's first thought when all this came about was "OMG, Customers might build their own solutions and not buy our First-party apps". So up until very recently, it was a requirement that to get CDS, you had to buy one of their first-party apps. To me this seemed like a lack of confidence in the value of their first-party apps. Salesforce is not lacking any confidence, they have had a platform-only license for years, and it has not hurt their first-party apps. In fact, it probably drove many first-party app sales. As they thought this through, it seems Microsoft came to the same conclusion, and we had another "pivot". Mix and Match For the customer, it is not a "one or the other" option. Sure, you can go with pure CDS and build everything from scratch. But what if the first-party Sales apps works great for you... but the "Service" app does not? No problem, the PowerApps license is included with most of the First-party apps. Meaning you can use the Enterprise Sales App for sales, but build you own unique service app on CDS. BTW, they both are running on the same underlying database, meaning your same Accounts, Contacts etc.. PowerApps is PaaS I don't know that I have heard Microsoft refer to Model-Driven Powerapps on a bare CDS as a "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) offering, but that is what it feels like to me. Just one more area where Microsoft is leading with "Platform". Like I said, for certain customers, this will be huge, for most it will be "So What".  But one camp that is drooling at the mouth is ISVs. Powered by PowerApps is Microsoft's answer to Salesforce's Force.com platform. A quick internet search for "Powered by Salesforce" will return a bunch of ISV solutions. Most of these solutions are vertically specific, highly targeted applications. This is an area where Microsoft would like to land some punches, and PowerApps is a new fist. I foresee, in the very near future, "Powered by Dynamics 365" will return similar results. Specific Vertical applications, for which the requirements were not contemplated by the first-party apps. So we start a new championship bout, the announcer says "Let's get ready to ruummble"... ding, ding  .

This episode of CRM Audio is brought to you by Ingenius. On May 1, 2018, Microsoft announced the general availability of Model Driven Power Apps. As we covered earlier, the underlying "XRM" platform is now common data service, and application configuration that we think of as D365 Customer Engagement/CRM are now considered "Model Driven PowerApps." In the first half of this episode, Joel and Shawn discuss what Model Driven PowerApps are, how they are licensed, and what you need to know about them.  In the second half, George Doubinski and David Yack join the conversation and discuss what the move to MDPA really means, is this "the new Microsoft Access," and how CRM people can get ready for Model Driven PowerApps. Links discussed in this episode: Official announcement Scott Durow: Is CDS Really the New XRM? PowerApps Licensing Restricted entities requiring Dynamics 365 license This episode is a production of Dynamic Podcasts LLC. Subscribe to the  CRM Audio network of podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.  

Episode 63: Markus Erlandsson talks to Jukka Niiranen from Elisa about Dynamics 365 Spring Release 2018. Jukka explains what the new Business Application Platform is all about and how it is based on Common Data Service and how that is the 2.0 of XRM. We speculate if there ever will be a next version of on-premise … Continue reading Dynamics 365 Spring Release 2018 with Jukka Niiranen

There is one week every year where the largest concentration of CRM MVPs is recorded, and that is the Microsoft MVP Summit. During the MVP Summit 2018, I asked 10 CRM MVPs to answer the 22 tough questions you see below and I recorded their answers for all to enjoy, discuss, and learn from. Questions: Should Microsoft get rid off Dynamics 365 On-Premise? Why or Why not? How do you think the new Dynamics 365 for Marketing App affects stablished Marketing Automation Solutions such as ClickDimensions, Salesfusion, Act-On, and others? Salesforce and Google continue to collaborate and recently announced tighter integrations between the solutions offered by both organizations, how would a Salesforce acquisition by Google disrupt Dynamics 365’s momentum? One of the things Marc Benioff - the CEO of Salesforce – mentioned on their last big conference was that “Microsoft can’t seem to keep their Dynamics 365 leadership in place”, are those comments accurate? And if so, why do you think that’s happening? Salesforce continues to be a leader in the CRM space with around 25% of the market share globally while Microsoft holds a smaller share, what can Microsoft do to catch up to Salesforce? How important is to master tools such as Microsoft Flow and Power Apps for a Dynamics 365 Solution Architect today? Speaking from the point of view of thousands of partners who are based in the US, why should I care about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) approved by the European Union Parliament on April of 2016? As the Dynamics 365 world grows, many developers from other products or platforms are making a jump into Dynamics 365 and other related technologies, what would you recommend to these developers to focus on learning so they can make a big impact in the near future? AppSource continues to grow and new items are added often, how do you keep up with what is being released and do you have any go-to apps? If you were the Dynamics 365 Product Owner for a day, what are some of the changes or improvements you would like to see added to Dynamics 365? If you could go back and re-do something inside Dynamics 365, what would it be and why? What kind of solution or company would you like to see Microsoft acquire and incorporate into their Dynamics 365 roster next? In your opinion, what is the most underrated feature of Dynamics 365? Now that Microsoft eliminated the branding of XRM, how has this impacted your approach to implementations and conversations with the community? There are hundreds of suggestions on the Microsoft Connect or Idea portal for Dynamics 365 enhancements, some of the suggestions date back a few years, if you had to pick one of those ideas to be incorporated into the next version of Dynamics 365, which one would it be? What is your favorite thing about working with Dynamics 365? What is your favorite part of the MVP Summit and why? What is your favorite thing about being a Microsoft MVP? If you could give one advice to aspiring CRM MVPs, what would it be? We are very fortunate to live in the US and have the ability to travel to and speak at conferences and other events, but what would you say to someone who might not be able to do what we do and who’s wondering if they can add value to the Dynamics 365 community? Which non-MVP community leader do you want to see here at the Microsoft MVP Summit next year and why? Lastly and just for fun, if there was a “CRM MVP for Life Award” and only one CRM MVP could be selected, who should the award go to and why? I would like to thank Ulrik Carlsson and Seth Bacon for contributing questions to this list. And of course, here are the CRM MVPs who stood outside a building for an hour in freezing weather to answer these questions: Colin Vermander (https://twitter.com/koolin_) Sheila Shapari (https://twitter.com/SheilaShahpari) Daryl LaBar (https://twitter.com/ddlabar) Neil Benson (https://twitter.com/customery) Gustaf Westerlund (https://twitter.com/crmgustaf) Britta Rekstad (https://twitter.com/MacgyverCRM) Leon Tribe (https://twitter.com/leontribe) Rick McCutcheon (https://twitter.com/rick_mccutcheon) Shawn Tabor (https://twitter.com/CRMhobbit) Joel Lindstrom (https://twitter.com/JoelLindstrom) Follow us/Subscribe:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/CRMMVPPodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAhjoi4W_K7sLNpXr9Kqz8w

In this webinar, you will learn about the power of 3D imaging of larger samples. In particular, you will: - Gain insight in to how to use x-ray microscopy to analyze biological samples - Learn the basics about sample preparation for x-ray microscopy - Understand the benefits and drawbacks to different imaging conditions X-Ray Microscopy (XRM) is a relatively new technique that combines the geometric magnification of traditional micro-CT with the optical magnification of light microscopy. Using XRM you can image the internal structure of objects with fine resolution without destroying the sample. For example, the Zeiss Versa XRM system allows an unprecedented view inside samples varying in size from the mesoscale (cm) to the microscale (µm) at consistently sub-micron image resolutions. This webinar will focus on biological applications of X-Ray microscopy. We will cover imaging calcified structures, such as bone, to soft tissues, like the intervertebral disc. You will also learn about visualizing blood vessels using vascular tracing agents. In addition, we will cover the basics of sample preparation along with the pros and cons of different imaging conditions. Finally, we will give you a sneak view into using XRM to spatially target, in three-dimensions, tissue specific structures in a whole organism for 3D ultrastructural imaging using Focused Ion Beam – Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) using the ATLAS 5 Correlative Workspace.

Episode 50: Markus Erlandsson talks to Jukka Niiranen from Digital Illustrated about The State of Dynamics 365 Sales in 2017. The discussion starts with what is happening with the term CRM and how is the xRM going forward? Then what’s happening with the Common Data Service. How are the apps, Customer Service, Field Services and … Continue reading The State of Dynamics 365 Sales in 2017 with Jukka Niiranen

Jeff, Ira, and Corey chat about the NFL Draft, future picks from FSU, Jalen Ramsey to Jacksonville, and XRM's return.

1. Bryce began his baseball career. What kind of sports-dad is Jeff? 2. What's Jimbo liking and disliking out of the team right now? 3. Tom's excited about college basketball? You should be too! XRM is coming back.

1. Ira Schoffel calls the show! 2. XRM is ACC Rookie Of The Week for the 2nd time this year 3. The world is coming to an end....Steve Spurrier now has a Twitter account...

1. XRM goes OFF and the nation notices... even Mike Greenberg had something to say about the freshman. 2. David Hale from ESPN.com joins Jeff

Nous discutons avec Salim Adamon de la plateforme Dynamics CRM. Dynamics CRM est un logiciel de gestion de la relation client développé par Microsoft. Tel quel, le produit se concentre principalement sur le secteur des ventes, du marketing, et du service (help desk), mais Microsoft commercialise Dynamics CRM comme une plateforme de xRM et encourage les partenaires à utiliser son API propriétaire (basé sur Microsoft .NET) pour répondre aux nombreuses exigences de gestion de la relation client. Bio: Consultant en informatique et développeur de solutions avec un intérêt particulier pour les solutions d'entreprise, depuis les quatre dernières années, Salim se concentre sur la conception de solutions basées sur la plateforme Microsoft Dynamics CRM. En 2014, il a reçu la reconnaissance Most Valuable Professional (MVP) de Microsoft. Il a participé à divers projets avec des rôles allant d’architecte à celui d’analyste d'affaires en passant par programmeur Microsoft .Net. Il est passionné de technologies et aime la musique et le sport. Vous pouvez suivre son parcours sur son blog. Liens: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community